General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: American education fails to teach us anything about American history. [View all]hunter
(38,302 posts)They are specifically designed to make it easy for teachers and school districts uncomfortable with the facts of racism in U.S. history, or evolution in biology, to dance very lightly over those "sections."
Nevertheless, evolution is the core principal of biology, and racism, frequently to genocidal extremes, is the central outstanding feature of U.S.A. history.
My kids' AP high school history teacher pushed the boundaries -- he had Zinn's People's History on his class reading list. If a kid couldn't afford a copy, he'd make sure they got one. (I was introduced in college to the 1980 edition.)
My own grade school, middle school, and high school history textbooks were crap. I was lucky to have two history teachers who were somewhat subversive and mildly mocking of the texts they were forced to teach from.
Later, as a teacher myself, in a school where budgets for the Xerox and ditto machine were absurdly tight, I was grateful for my teachers who had dedicated some of their income and a lot of their time to provide us with alternative readings, printed up at their own expense at the commercial copy shops. A few cents a page on a teacher's salary with 100-200 students is not a negligible expense. I always spent a lot of my own money on lab supplies and handouts when I was teaching.
My sister-in-law is still teaching high school science and her official budget is pathetic, less than three dollars a student each year. And yes, they still expect you to do labs... Just one of some of the labs in the textbooks could blow an entire year's budget.