New Curriculum Endorses Teaching Historical Facts – Horrify Conservatives

[xchrom]

http://www.politicususa.com/2014/08/04/curriculum-endorses-teaching-historical-facts-horrify-conservatives.html


Columbus arrives. Notice the cross. You can bet that message was lost on the poor natives on the right.

“Thanksgiving is for real Americans not Indians. We founded this Christian nation. Why if it wasn’t for the God-fearing pilgrims, the natives would still be running around in loin cloths shooting at things with their arrows.” – Sarah Palin, 2008.
Don’t think the Barton crowd only wants you to think slaves didn’t have it so bad after all, or that white folks were somehow the real victims of slavery. Telling the truth about American history, particularly its settlement, makes you an “America hater.”

God forbid school kids find out American history is not about its rich white male heroes but about persecuted religious minorities, about black slaves, about poor white folk treated like slaves as indentured servants, about native Americans who had their lands stolen and their tribes decimated by disease.

Enter College Board’s AP United States History Curriculum Framework 2014-2015, which dares to point out that “traditional ways of categorizing the past” leave groups like American Indians underrepresented in our history books and that “historical phenomena or processes connect to broader regional, national, or global processes.” It dares to suggest that “Historical thinking involves the ability to define and frame a question about the past.”

You can hear conservatives now: “B-but, you’re not supposed to question the past…you’re supposed to just believe!”

[Demit]

1. Why did you leave out the "Attributed falsely, but all too believably, to" Sarah Palin?

I mean, I assume you copied/pasted this content right from your link. Why bother doing that? It's a little dishonest. Stupid of the author to make it up the quote in the first place, but...

[Go Vols]

2. "Lies my teacher told me"

is a good read on this.

Loewen's politically correct critique of 12 American history textbooks—including The American Pageant by Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy; and Triumph of the American Nation by Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curti—is sure to please liberals and infuriate conservatives. In condemning the way history is taught, he indicts everyone involved in the enterprise: authors, publishers, adoption committees, parents and teachers. Loewen (Mississippi: Conflict and Change) argues that the bland, Eurocentric treatment of history bores most elementary and high school students, who also find it irrelevant to their lives. To make learning more compelling, Loewen urges authors, publishers and teachers to highlight the drama inherent in history by presenting students with different viewpoints and stressing that history is an ongoing process, not merely a collection of—often misleading—factoids. Readers interested in history, whether liberal or conservative, professional or layperson, will find food for thought here. Illustrated.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

[upaloopa]

3. When I grew up history took place in Europe

then came to America by Columbus and he may have been preceded by the Vikings. What was funny to me was that Columbus met Native Americans but they never seemed to have any history. They just were. Then comes all the European explorers who were looking for a way to the East to trade with people there who also just were without a history. Before Columbus though there was a history in Europe where the Crusaders fought the Moors also a people who just were and had no history.
It was strange to me to know that all over the world there were people besides the Europeans but they had no history.

[calimary]

4. I remember, in high school, only the honor students were offered "Non European History" as a course.

And at that time, our textbook was a volume called "Thailand, Burma, Laos, and Cambodia." It was the Vietnam era, of course. Which made for some interesting reading about the Diem regime. But Africa was ignored. Most of Asia and the Middle East - not included. Australia/New Zealand? What's THAT? Imperial Japan? Nope. South America? What - are you KIDDING??? Central America? There was never any focus on that, in ANY history courses at all, except for fleeting mentions of Cortez and the Aztecs.

[Dreamer Tatum]

5. I get your point, but to be intellectually honest, Palin didn't say that. nt