The New History Wars

[elleng]

WITH the news dominated by stories of Americans dying at home and abroad, it might seem trivial to debate how history is taught in our schools. But if we want students to understand what is happening in Missouri or the Middle East, they need an unvarnished picture of our past and the skills to understand and interpret that picture. People don’t kill one another just for recreation. They have reasons. Those reasons are usually historical.

Last month, the College Board released a revised “curriculum framework” to help high school teachers prepare students for the Advanced Placement test in United States history. Like the college courses the test is supposed to mirror, the A.P. course calls for a dialogue with the past — learning how to ask historical questions, interpret documents and reflect both appreciatively and critically on history.

Navigating the tension between patriotic inspiration and historical thinking, between respectful veneration and critical engagement, is an especially difficult task, made even more complicated by a marked shift in the very composition of “we the people.” This fall, whites will constitute a minority of public-school students in the United States. “Our” past is now more diverse than we once thought, whether we like it or not.

It turns out that some Americans don’t like it. A member of the Texas State Board of Education has accused the College Board of “promoting among our students a disdain for American principles and a lack of knowledge of major American achievements,” like those of the founding fathers and of the generals who fought in the Civil War and World War II. The Republican National Committee says the framework offers “a radically revisionist view” that “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history.” Stanley Kurtz, in National Review, called it “an attempt to hijack the teaching of U.S. history on behalf of a leftist political and ideological perspective.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/opinion/the-new-history-wars.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

[underpants]

1. The Texas State Board of Education is a front group

They massively overspend on textbooks so that THEY become the market controller. Their primary goal is to falsely establish conservative "Christian" as the truth, to deflect actual science from being taught, and to prevent the actual market driver, California (the 6th largest economy in the world) from controlling the text book market like they do the auto industry. The Texas Board is full of unqualified Bible (t)humping ideological freaks.

[elleng]

2. Yes, and they've been doing it for years,

one of the many reasons our educational 'system' is so messed up.

[Adsos Letter]

3. Gary Nash fought this same type of battle with Elizabeth Dole

and Lynne Cheney...back then it was over how American social history was going to be addressed.

Control of the historical record is a powerful tool. Witness the xenophobic histories of the US written during the 19th-early 20th centuries.

[elleng]

4. Right.

'In 1994, Lynne Cheney, a former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, pronounced the results of a congressionally mandated set of national standards in American history “grim and gloomy,” distorted by “political correctness,” and deficient for paying too much attention to the Ku Klux Klan and McCarthyism and too little to Robert E. Lee and the Wright brothers.'

[Adsos Letter]

6. Ah, yes...

...that's what I get for skimming the OP, and not clicking your link...

The case with Nash, et. al., came to mind because we studied it during a graduate Historiography course.

[elleng]

7. That's fine, Adsos Letter,

I often do the same. I also recall hearing about cheney's book, and all the b.s. she put in there, like 'we' don't spend enough time genuflecting the Founders. WHAT AN IDIOT she is!

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. "Keep yore hands off OUR propaganda, dammit!"

There...Texan translated for ya.