THIS movement by right wing fanatics and tea-baggers to revise and sanitize American history is sick and perverse but not surprising. After all, these are the same people who have no problem perverting and twisting the teachings of Jesus Christ and calling it Christianity. I would suggest these people would be more comfortable politically and spiritually in the prc as their revisionist white paper on Hong Kong asserts only leaders who "love the country (prc) and Hong Kong" should be on the ballot in 2017. From +AlterNet , +NPR , the +Washington Post , +Daily Kos , .....
September 24, 2014
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Review criteria shall include the following: instructional materials should present the most current factual information accurately and objectively. Theories should be distinguished from fact. Materials should promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights. Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law. Instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage. Content pertaining to political and social movements in history should present balanced and factual treatment of the positions.What Board Chairman Ken Witt probably didn't expect is what happened next. Yesterday, hundreds of students from five high schools marched out of their classrooms and into the streets to reject the conservative board's proposal. Carrying signs such as “people didn't die so we could erase them,” the students demanded that the proposal be withdrawn.
To get a sense of the size of the protests, the local CBS station reported that 500 students walked out at a single high school, Arvada West High. That is about a third of the students at the school.
In addition to the mass student protests, teachers have been leading actions as well. Last week, as many as 50 teachers at Standley Lake and Conifer high schools staged a sickout to protest the new standards, forcing classes to be canceled.
As both teachers and students continue to speak out, it appears that by attempting to suppress history curriculum that includes information about social strife and protest, Witt is ironically creating it, and teaching an entire nation of its value.
Watch a report from 7 NEWS about the hundreds of students who protested yesterday.
Listen to the Story
3 min 12 sec
Students line a busy intersection and overpass in the
Denver suburb of Littleton, Colo., on Sept. 25, protesting a Jefferson
County School Board proposal to emphasize patriotism and downplay civil
unrest in the teaching of U.S. history.
Brennan Linsley/AP
The firestorm of protest was sparked by a resolution in August from Jefferson County school board member Julie Williams. When she heard that conservatives across the country were upset about the new AP history curriculum, she proposed a committee to review the district's courses.
The resolution stated that AP history classes should promote "patriotism and ... the benefits of the free-enterprise system" and should not "encourage or condone civil disorder."
"Basically, what I am asking for is for history to be taught complete," Williams said in an interview with the local Fox affiliate. "So the good, the bad, the ugly, without bias."
Jefferson County, Colorado's second-largest school district, has been in turmoil ever since a conservative majority was elected to the school board in November 2013, but Williams' proposal set off a new wave of unrest.
It started with 100 students, including Ben Smith from Standley Lake High School, northwest of Denver. He says students don't want their history censored and don't like that the resolution called for promoting the positive aspects of U.S. history.
The protests spread throughout the district to more than a dozen high schools. Teachers also were angered: Four high schools closed for a day when teachers organized a "sick out." They say the board isn't listening to them — or parents — on a range of issues, including AP.
But the Advanced Placement curriculum, for which students can get college credit, is the flashpoint.
The revamped framework aims to de-emphasize rote memorization and instead develop critical thinking skills. But some conservatives say there's an anti-American bias.
Larry Krieger, a retired New Jersey high school teacher who is leading a national fight against the new framework, testified via video conference before Colorado's state board of education. He says the new materials don't mention events like D-Day or key historical characters.
"The founders are not discussed," he says. "Ben Franklin: not there. James Madison: not there."
But that doesn't mean teachers will leave out D-Day or the nation's founders, says Fred Anderson, a history professor at the University of Colorado who helped write the new framework.
"These are usually the very best teachers in a school. You don't have to tell them to talk about Wilson and Madison, and Franklin and Washington at the Constitutional Convention — they do that," he says. "They would find it incredibly condescending to be directed at that level, so the absence of mention is not in any sense an exclusion — and it's a misconception, I think, about the framework that that's the case."
In Jefferson County, after two weeks of protest, the original language about patriotism was dropped. On Thursday night, the school board stripped of the most controversial language and then passed the resolution, which still creates a committee to review course materials.
Meanwhile, the College Board, which administers the AP test, says that if a school or district censors essential concepts from an AP course, that course can no longer bear the "Advanced Placement" designation.
Materials should not encourage or condone civil disorder, social strife or disregard of the law. Instructional materials should present positive aspects of the United States and its heritage. Content pertaining to political and social movements in history should present balanced and factual treatment of the positions.Teachers walked out in protest; a meeting of the Jefferson County school board this week became chaos. Colorado Public Radio spoke to the school board member, Julie Williams. "She said she’s not trying to eliminate the facts of U.S. history but shares the concerns conservatives nationally have outlined," they report, "that AP History casts some parts of history in a negative light, such as the bombing of Hiroshima and slavery."
The subtext, to any observer of American politics, is pretty clear. From Vietnam War protests to reviews of Hillary Clinton's relationship with Saul Alinsky, the nature of loving or criticizing or disliking the United States and what it means for our democracy has been the subject of political debate for a long time.
As in: For more than a century.
In 1900, the Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of New York helped compile and then produced a "Manual of Patriotism" -- a book distributed to schools throughout the state in an effort to bolster children's understanding and appreciation of America and its history.
The timing on that is significant. The aforementioned superintendent, Charles Skinner, was a former school board member and member of the U.S. House of Representatives, a blend of education and politics that clearly influenced the push for the manual. In 1895, he assumed oversight of the state's school system. It was a period of transition globally, with new calls for labor rights, early expansion of the tenets of communism, and a spreading embrace of the idea of anarchy. Less than a decade prior, a bomb allegedly set by anarchists during a labor rally at Haymarket Square in Chicago killed seven people. By 1899, the United States was at war in the Philippines, trying to crush a rebellion against American rule.
Skinner's book, produced after an act of the state legislature, was clearly a response to those undercurrents. In the preface, he writes:
The manual is now submitted to the teachers and the supervising officers of the State, and to them is entrusted the important duty of so using the material provided as to make at least some of its noble utterances, its vivid pictures of great deeds and patriotic sacrifices, and its quotations from the sayings of men honored for their clear and patriotic vision, a part of the very souls of the pupils entrusted to their care.This is different and loftier language than Williams used, but the intent is similar. Skinner and the legislature wanted a particular vision of America -- a more positive one -- to be the one schoolchildren brought with them into later life.
The "Manual of Patriotism," of which I own a copy, is perhaps more direct in its aims.
Here are some key passages:
"Can anything be more striking and sublime then the idea of an Imperial Republic," its description of "Liberty" declared, even as the country exercised that imperialism against the Filipinos' liberty, "spreading over and extent of territory more minutes than the Empire of the Caesars in the accumulated conquest of 1000 years ... founded in the maxims of common sense, and employing within itself no arms but those of reason ...?"
"Let us all praise and thank the Legislature of our great Empire State for that law which compels every schoolhouse to keep the flag flying during school time," one of the many sections on the utility of the flag reads. Flags at school were a theme:
"It is well for each boy and girl to own a flag … or for each district to furnish a sufficient number. The flags can be lightly fastened upon the wall transforming bare and cheerless spots into a bright glow of colors; or, if patriotic pictures are on the walls, the flags may be draped about them with excellent effect."
The book offers several dozen song choices. It is replete with poems and tales of the Founding Fathers. It culminates in a day-by-day guide to events in American history. It is, as its title suggests, a manual in a very particular type of American patriotism.
Skinner went on to witness the contentiousness of the moment in much more direct ways. He was in Buffalo in September 1901 to hear his friend, President William McKinley, give a speech, when McKinley was assassinated by Leon Czolgosz. Skinner subsequently wrote about the incident and about attending Czolgosz's execution for the now-defunct State Service magazine.
It was actually the second presidential assassin to whose execution Skinner was invited. In 1882, Skinner missed his chance to see the execution of Charles Guiteau for assassinating President James. A. Garfield; his ill daughter meant he had to decline an invitation to attend.
He had better luck with Czolgosz. He tells of Czolgosz's last words:
Talking very rapidly he said: “The reason I killed the president was because he was an enemy of the good people—for the benefit of the working man. That’s all there is about it—I am awful sorry I couldn’t see my father. I am not sorry for my crime.”In the "Suggestions to Teachers," which Skinner offered at the beginning of his manual, he explains how he intended the book to be used. "Do not look upon this Manual as a text-book in American history," he wrote. "Teach [pupils] the wonderful power that abides in great personalities. Hold before their eyes a vision of the commanding figures of our own American history. Inspire them with a sentiment of loyalty and devotion to native land."
When he spoke the last words all thoughts of pity left us. Any one of the witnesses would have been willing to be the executioner.
That effort continues today.
The full text of the book, via the Internet Archive.
Philip
Bump writes about politics for The Fix. He previously wrote for The
Wire, the news blog of The Atlantic magazine. He has contributed to The
Daily Beast, The Atlantic, The Daily, and the Huffington Post. Philip is
based in New York City.
Fox News commentator and likely 2016 presidential also-ran
Ben Carson is joining the chorus of far-right howling against the
College Board's new Advanced Placement U.S. History framework. Carson is
even one-upping the conservative members of the Jefferson County,
Colorado, school board who've threatened to substitute a curriculum that stresses respect for authority and capitalism. Carson, though, is taking the rhetoric up a notch:
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Wed Oct 01, 2014 at 10:27 AM PDT
Ben Carson: AP History will make students join ISIS
Ben Carson
"There's only two paragraphs in there about George Washington ... little or nothing about Martin Luther King, a whole section on slavery and how evil we are, a whole section on Japanese internment camps and how we slaughtered millions of Japanese with our bombs," Carson said at the event. He continued, "I think most people when they finish that course, they'd be ready to go sign up for ISIS ... We have got to stop this silliness crucifying ourselves."AP History and ISIS in the same rant—that is some skilled intertwining of conservative boogeymen. Obviously none of this makes any sense whatsoever. Is the course supposed to teach about Martin Luther King Jr. without teaching about segregation? Because if it teaches about segregation, isn't that similar to teaching about slavery and internment camps? The turn to ISIS, though, is particularly revealing. The implicit suggestion is that if teens learn that the United States ever did anything bad in its entire history, they will turn against the nation today. Apparently Carson doesn't believe it's possible to learn from history and do better ... which might explain something about his party's politics.
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