9 ms·

‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’ and America’s Post-Truth Era

109 points by matt4077 8y ago

projektir 8y ago
> We historians tend to make everything so nuanced that the idea of truth almost disappears. People in graduate history programs have said things to me like: Why should we privilege one narrative above others with the term “true”? That kind of implies that all narratives are equal—or, at least, that all narratives have some merit, that no narrative has all the merit. This is happening a lot among more than just historians and it's a serious problem. Some things are true and that has consequences. Ignored, reality will pass us by.
- maze-le 8y ago
  I can see this development as well, and I think it is the influence of postmodernism. As a philosophical thought the postmodernist school states (among other things) that all knowledge is sociol-culturally conditioned, so no bit of knowledge can be evaluated without evaluating the cultural context in which it is created. This leads to a situation in which all {opinions / stories / facts / utterances} are viewed as equally meaningful and important. In the 1980s no one cared, because the discourse was purely academic in nature. By now postmodernism has gained widespread adoption in education, social sciences and political theory. And the citation from above is the direct result of that.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    A bit off topic, but: What is the postmodern stance on lies? If "all {opinions / stories / facts / utterances} are viewed as equally meaningful and important", does that leave any place for saying that something is a lie? If not, that's a huge problem. If your philosophy/epistemology doesn't understand that some things are simply lies, and some statements are simply intending to lie, that leaves a huge vulnerability for liars to exploit.
- olavk 8y ago
  History is extremely complex and nuanced, that is the problem. It literally encompasses everything that ever happened. So anything you can say about history is inherently an oversimplification with ignores a lot of possible angles and voices and narratives. Just deciding what goes into a textbook in inherently political, even if everything stated in the book are objective truths.
  - m_mueller 8y ago
    The scientific way of looking at the world has never been, and potentially will never be, absolutely true, as in a correct model that explains reality in all its facets. I do however disagree with your position in one decisive way: The scientific method demands that any stated fact is falsifiable, and that already falsified facts are not used again as a basis for further theories. Once it has been shown that flat earth is false, it cannot simply be said to be "a different opinion" and that we have no right to stop its further propagation. Nothing is provenly true, but we know what's false, anything else is still up for discussion. So, once it has been shown with reasonable documentation that things like Ausschwitz or Nanking or Japanese internment in the US happened, it is not up to "politics" to make it part of history or not. Sure, it can be rationalized and interpreted in different ways, but that doesn't change any of the facts, as long as there is not a solid disprove of these events that can deal with all the evidence that supports them. Edit: The statement that contents are "political" is a classic unfalsifiable claim, thus is an invalid argument. Evidence demands counter-evidence.
    - olavk 8y ago
      We can agree that the earth is not flat, but I don't think this is really the issue. The article mentions the question whether the Japanese internement is treated in single sentence, or on multiple pages with pictures, personal accounts etc. Stating it is "a fact" does not really help you decide which approach is appropriate for an US history textbook. Yeah we can agree that textbooks should not make objectively false statements, but that is not really the difficult part.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    The issue is that there are narratives that are 99% true (like the West's version of the Tiananmen massacre, or the Holocaust/WW2), and narratives that are 1% true, and deliberate misleading (like China's version, and Nazi's or Iran's version of the Holocaust/WW2) People don't want to own to what they did. Not individual criminals, not states, not governments, not religions. Especially not when there's financial consequences. (but the fact that western governments also hide disgusting acts they committed does not change the fact that there is a serious scale difference)
- 0x445442 8y ago
  I find most of the folks espousing "nuance" and "narrative" are, in the end, really just arguing against positions they don't agree with using high brow language. Case in point would be to point them to David Irving's work on holocaust history and watch them flee from "nuance" and back to "truth".
  - olavk 8y ago
    Do you think that "nuance" means that everything is equally true? I think that is a strawman. Holocaust deniers are factually wrong just like flat-earthers. Understanding that there is no single concise objectively true narrative of history is not the same as having to believe that the pyramids were built by aliens.
    - 0x445442 8y ago
      Have you read Irving's work?
      - olavk 8y ago
        No. (But I have read an account of the Irving v. Penguin trial, if you take issue with calling him a Holocaust denier.)
42droids 8y ago
I am from Europe and I find that this is true for all European countries.
teddyh 8y ago
I think it’s less likely to be intentional historical revisionism, and more likely that Hanlon’s razor applies: http://machall.com/view.php?date=2005-04-06 http://machall.com/view.php?date=2005-04-06
- olavk 8y ago
  Hanlons Razor is often appropriate, but I'm not sure it is in the case of history teaching. Teachers don't teach an incorrect or skewed version of history because they are "dumb". They either do it because the want to impart certain ideas and values to the students, or because they genuinely believe this is a appropriate view of history, which just pushes the question one level back - because who then taught the teacher the skewed version of history?
  - claydavisss 8y ago
    Teachers teach the curriculum they are assigned, that is all. The only variation is in private schools that do not conform to State and Federal curriculum standards by default. In public schools, teachers do not decide what they teach. Standardized testing guarantees that teachers stick to the script also.
    - castlecrasher2 8y ago
      Different teachers can teach the same topic differently, often according to their personal views. Did you never see that in school?
      - claydavisss 8y ago
        Not since Common Core. Curriculums are becoming rigid with States and mostly predictable nationally. If schools deviate they risk losing funding...and frankly most teachers are happy to read from a script.
        germinalphrase 8y ago
baud147258 8y ago
I've found it's true as well in France, regarding a lot of things, like the middle age, age of enlightenment, the French Revolution and colonisation.
- saiya-jin 8y ago
  Yeah, french people are very patriotic. There are some good reasons for that, be it past or present, beauty of the country etc, but as with other over-patriotic countries (I am looking at you US, but not only), a lot of people like simple world views so France/US/whatever becomes simply the best country ever, no real discussion allowed, critical view is ignored or simply attacked. A bit more humble approach would do everybody much better, since every single country out there has done things to be ashamed of, or outright utterly horrible. Realizing you are not that much better than the other guy may bring some sense of equality that I don't see in current world (american life worth more than some other, modern colonialism done by former colonial powers including US, Russia and probably China, and so on and on).
  - baud147258 8y ago
    Well, it not always in that direction, sure we got some patriotic chest-thumping but also some abhorence of past achievements/periods/characters.
claydavisss 8y ago
I have reviewed most of the history my kids learned as they were growing up. Most of it is actually decent. Often, uncomfortable truths are avoided where contemporary standards differ wildly from a historical context. This is unfortunate because students do not understand that "normal" changes over time. This is probably most pronounced wrt race relations (e.g. what passed as normal race relations in 1860 throughout the entire US would be considered outrageously racist now...or the idea that in 1943 Americans sympathized with imprisoned Japanese citizens, the normalcy of anti-Semitism throughout most of history etc). Instead children are taught to view the past through the standards and tastes of the present, and history becomes a matter of making moral judgements and shaping present morality (a valuable function but not the point of history). But indeed even our study of history will one day make great history...what happens when history is written by people who have never had to kill to survive?
- brobdingnagians 8y ago
  Which is a real shame since one of the points of learning history is to understand why things happened and how very different things can be from our own times and cultures. It is good to go through the uncomfortable bits, since those are the most difficult to understand, and the most rewarding. I sometimes think that the difference between one culture through time is larger than the difference in culture between two different countries now. It is good to understand the most different things, either to avoid them and their root cause, or to adopt the things people in history have done better than us. History repeats itself :D
- danharaj 8y ago
  > This is unfortunate because students do not understand that "normal" changes over time. This is probably most pronounced wrt race relations (e.g. what passed as normal race relations in 1860 throughout the entire US would be considered outrageously racist now... There were people back then who thought it was an outrage too. Maybe you should be more uncomfortable with the past.
  - claydavisss 8y ago
    It is likely that a few centuries from now our degradation of the environment will be subject to a different moral filter...yet how many of us feel uncomfortable buying a new smartphone? The problem of moralizing is that our present "high horses" are wobbly.
OliverJones 8y ago
The Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell has a podcast called "Revisionist History" http://revisionisthistory.com/ http://revisionisthistory.com/ in which he drills into particular episodes of US history. I find it interesting, even though I don't have the academic historical chops to independently assess its accuracy. Example: In the episode called Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment, Gladwell explains that Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (the famous school integration case) had a severe consequence. It caused a large fraction of African American schoolteachers and educators to be thrown out of work. He points out that teaching was a major source of 1930s-1950s knowledge-work employment for African Americans was teaching in segregated schools. Quite a few Euro-American school boards obeyed the ruling admitting African American students, but did not employ the teachers from thew schools they left. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-period-of-adjustment http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-per...
- tpurves 8y ago
  You have to be careful with Gladwell. His primary gift, is that is he is an incredible storyteller. Take him as entertainment not as a historian or scientist. He goes for surprising and unexpected simple reasons for everything, often by cherry-picking individual facts or annecdotes.
  - cujo 8y ago
    Do you have any particular instances of him getting it wrong. I often here this concern, but I'm yet to find someone that can point to a moment and say he got it wrong.
    - chuckgreenman 8y ago
      This article from the Columbia Journalism review is level headed but tough, and brings in a few specific examples: https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_deb...
  - paulcole 8y ago
yosefzeev 8y ago
This book was a breath of fresh air for me. I had taken a college level course in history not terribly long before this book came out, and I felt that much of the content was wrong or questionable. This book helped confirm my original suspicion something I struggled with for quite some time. I am glad to see the author is pushing forward with what he originally stated. He was right. On another note, it is interesting to see the flag has the gold trim around it in this shot.
- finaliteration 8y ago
  I also enjoyed this book. However, I find it strange you had that experience in a college level course. I took two terms of US history in college and the professor had zero qualms about calling out discrepancies and shining a light on how history was/is written through certain cultural standards and lenses. Despite not really being a “history person”, they were some of my favorite courses because I felt like there was very little bullshit being presented as absolute truth.
  - MrLeap 8y ago
    Different professors are different. The person who taught my college general education literature class used it as an opportunity to unapologetically proselytize the good word of Jesus Christ. 90% of every quiz question or essay prompt was relating every book back to Christianity. I found it offensive, but at this point in my college career the fight had been abraded out of me. I tried doing the assignments dispassionately, writing things like "Taking for granted that there is an omnipotent entity at the helm of the universe, I think the author contends that <rest of my answer>". I'd get my paper back with every secular apologism scribbled out in red, and comments on the margins that were like "JESUS LIVES" and other such academically cool business. Also he was giving me D's. This was a state school, not a religious one. Having fought 25% of my professors that ended up being lunatics no appetite remained in me to take this one to the tribunal. So, I salvaging my grade by feigning conversion. I started writing incomprehensibly unrelated answers to short essay questions. A question might read something like "In what way was Dostoevsky influenced by stoicism." I would answer "God is great!" My reward was A's. I no longer find anything within a normal distribution of human arch-types strange.
pjc50 8y ago
There is an excellent fun little book "1066 and All That", which parodies English history as people remember it from their education. It happens to have been written in 1930 but most of its jokes hold up, and the subset that people remember from that period hasn't changed quite so much. History as remembered by the public is always going to be fragments made into a mythos. The problem is that some of that mythos defines the propaganda contours of the present, whether that's people saying the US civil war wasn't about slavery or whether it's Brexiteers saying that "no deal will be fine because we survived the second world war".
throw2016 8y ago
The sanitized version prevents people from comprehending the scope of the horror and abuse, bequeaths an air of normalcy, and leads to simplistic conclusions in modern generations. At every given point minorities have faced huge resistance for the simplest of things and basic human equality and dignity - and I suspect every adult educated citizen knows this - and the effects of these continue to fester. It's not 'complexity' if you historically discriminate against people they will suffer and there will be far reaching multi generational consequences. This can't be wished away in denial, how can a problem remain unsolved after 200 years? We hold others coming out of hundreds of years of colonialism to standards we often to do adhere to ourselves and which these societies lacking development, wealth and time have not had an opportunity to develop. This becomes another way to not shine the torch on ourselves. Redlining, housing policies, access to education, employment, credit, segregated living and education and the police & justice system will not pass scrutiny. And this has so far escaped global attention and censure but at some point the USA as a whole will be held to account for the condition of the minorities. And at that point the depravity of Pioneer and Volker funded studies by people like Charles Murray - whose work continues to be used even on an educated forums like this regularly, revisionist history and blaming others will not hold because we do not accept these excuses from other countries we hold to account.
Nasrudith 8y ago
Brings to mind another related absurd pedagogical approach the "lies to children" approach of starting by saying that molecules are the smallest object possible. Then atoms. Instead of being truthful and mentioning quarks but saying they are so advanced and deep that even most physicists don't even do anything with them calculation related or otherwise.
- quotemstr 8y ago
  "Lies to children" is a perfectly good pedagogic approach. Adding caveats to every concept sucks time and energy from learning the broad themes of the subject. When we teach people programming, we start with variables and loops and don't mention page faults and cache poisoning. The same goes for any field. Demanding nuance of a particular kind in history pedagogy, as you see often these days, is just a bad-faith "isolated demand for rigor" that has the effect of privileging the worldview of those demanding the selective nuance. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands...
millermp12 8y ago
Your "post-truth" is my Narrative Collapse

109 points by matt4077 8y ago

> We historians tend to make everything so nuanced that the idea of truth almost disappears. People in graduate history programs have said things to me like: Why should we privilege one narrative above others with the term “true”? That kind of implies that all narratives are equal—or, at least, that all narratives have some merit, that no narrative has all the merit. This is happening a lot among more than just historians and it's a serious problem. Some things are true and that has consequences. Ignored, reality will pass us by.

maze-le 8y ago
I can see this development as well, and I think it is the influence of postmodernism. As a philosophical thought the postmodernist school states (among other things) that all knowledge is sociol-culturally conditioned, so no bit of knowledge can be evaluated without evaluating the cultural context in which it is created. This leads to a situation in which all {opinions / stories / facts / utterances} are viewed as equally meaningful and important. In the 1980s no one cared, because the discourse was purely academic in nature. By now postmodernism has gained widespread adoption in education, social sciences and political theory. And the citation from above is the direct result of that.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  A bit off topic, but: What is the postmodern stance on lies? If "all {opinions / stories / facts / utterances} are viewed as equally meaningful and important", does that leave any place for saying that something is a lie? If not, that's a huge problem. If your philosophy/epistemology doesn't understand that some things are simply lies, and some statements are simply intending to lie, that leaves a huge vulnerability for liars to exploit.
olavk 8y ago
History is extremely complex and nuanced, that is the problem. It literally encompasses everything that ever happened. So anything you can say about history is inherently an oversimplification with ignores a lot of possible angles and voices and narratives. Just deciding what goes into a textbook in inherently political, even if everything stated in the book are objective truths.
- m_mueller 8y ago
  The scientific way of looking at the world has never been, and potentially will never be, absolutely true, as in a correct model that explains reality in all its facets. I do however disagree with your position in one decisive way: The scientific method demands that any stated fact is falsifiable, and that already falsified facts are not used again as a basis for further theories. Once it has been shown that flat earth is false, it cannot simply be said to be "a different opinion" and that we have no right to stop its further propagation. Nothing is provenly true, but we know what's false, anything else is still up for discussion. So, once it has been shown with reasonable documentation that things like Ausschwitz or Nanking or Japanese internment in the US happened, it is not up to "politics" to make it part of history or not. Sure, it can be rationalized and interpreted in different ways, but that doesn't change any of the facts, as long as there is not a solid disprove of these events that can deal with all the evidence that supports them. Edit: The statement that contents are "political" is a classic unfalsifiable claim, thus is an invalid argument. Evidence demands counter-evidence.
  - olavk 8y ago
    We can agree that the earth is not flat, but I don't think this is really the issue. The article mentions the question whether the Japanese internement is treated in single sentence, or on multiple pages with pictures, personal accounts etc. Stating it is "a fact" does not really help you decide which approach is appropriate for an US history textbook. Yeah we can agree that textbooks should not make objectively false statements, but that is not really the difficult part.
- candiodari 8y ago
  The issue is that there are narratives that are 99% true (like the West's version of the Tiananmen massacre, or the Holocaust/WW2), and narratives that are 1% true, and deliberate misleading (like China's version, and Nazi's or Iran's version of the Holocaust/WW2) People don't want to own to what they did. Not individual criminals, not states, not governments, not religions. Especially not when there's financial consequences. (but the fact that western governments also hide disgusting acts they committed does not change the fact that there is a serious scale difference)
0x445442 8y ago
I find most of the folks espousing "nuance" and "narrative" are, in the end, really just arguing against positions they don't agree with using high brow language. Case in point would be to point them to David Irving's work on holocaust history and watch them flee from "nuance" and back to "truth".
- olavk 8y ago
  Do you think that "nuance" means that everything is equally true? I think that is a strawman. Holocaust deniers are factually wrong just like flat-earthers. Understanding that there is no single concise objectively true narrative of history is not the same as having to believe that the pyramids were built by aliens.
  - 0x445442 8y ago
    Have you read Irving's work?
    - olavk 8y ago
      No. (But I have read an account of the Irving v. Penguin trial, if you take issue with calling him a Holocaust denier.)

42droids 8y ago

I am from Europe and I find that this is true for all European countries.

teddyh 8y ago

I think it’s less likely to be intentional historical revisionism, and more likely that Hanlon’s razor applies: http://machall.com/view.php?date=2005-04-06 http://machall.com/view.php?date=2005-04-06

olavk 8y ago
Hanlons Razor is often appropriate, but I'm not sure it is in the case of history teaching. Teachers don't teach an incorrect or skewed version of history because they are "dumb". They either do it because the want to impart certain ideas and values to the students, or because they genuinely believe this is a appropriate view of history, which just pushes the question one level back - because who then taught the teacher the skewed version of history?
- claydavisss 8y ago
  Teachers teach the curriculum they are assigned, that is all. The only variation is in private schools that do not conform to State and Federal curriculum standards by default. In public schools, teachers do not decide what they teach. Standardized testing guarantees that teachers stick to the script also.
  - castlecrasher2 8y ago
    Different teachers can teach the same topic differently, often according to their personal views. Did you never see that in school?
    - claydavisss 8y ago
      Not since Common Core. Curriculums are becoming rigid with States and mostly predictable nationally. If schools deviate they risk losing funding...and frankly most teachers are happy to read from a script.
      - germinalphrase 8y ago

baud147258 8y ago

I've found it's true as well in France, regarding a lot of things, like the middle age, age of enlightenment, the French Revolution and colonisation.

saiya-jin 8y ago
Yeah, french people are very patriotic. There are some good reasons for that, be it past or present, beauty of the country etc, but as with other over-patriotic countries (I am looking at you US, but not only), a lot of people like simple world views so France/US/whatever becomes simply the best country ever, no real discussion allowed, critical view is ignored or simply attacked. A bit more humble approach would do everybody much better, since every single country out there has done things to be ashamed of, or outright utterly horrible. Realizing you are not that much better than the other guy may bring some sense of equality that I don't see in current world (american life worth more than some other, modern colonialism done by former colonial powers including US, Russia and probably China, and so on and on).
- baud147258 8y ago
  Well, it not always in that direction, sure we got some patriotic chest-thumping but also some abhorence of past achievements/periods/characters.

claydavisss 8y ago

I have reviewed most of the history my kids learned as they were growing up. Most of it is actually decent. Often, uncomfortable truths are avoided where contemporary standards differ wildly from a historical context. This is unfortunate because students do not understand that "normal" changes over time. This is probably most pronounced wrt race relations (e.g. what passed as normal race relations in 1860 throughout the entire US would be considered outrageously racist now...or the idea that in 1943 Americans sympathized with imprisoned Japanese citizens, the normalcy of anti-Semitism throughout most of history etc). Instead children are taught to view the past through the standards and tastes of the present, and history becomes a matter of making moral judgements and shaping present morality (a valuable function but not the point of history). But indeed even our study of history will one day make great history...what happens when history is written by people who have never had to kill to survive?

brobdingnagians 8y ago
Which is a real shame since one of the points of learning history is to understand why things happened and how very different things can be from our own times and cultures. It is good to go through the uncomfortable bits, since those are the most difficult to understand, and the most rewarding. I sometimes think that the difference between one culture through time is larger than the difference in culture between two different countries now. It is good to understand the most different things, either to avoid them and their root cause, or to adopt the things people in history have done better than us. History repeats itself :D
danharaj 8y ago
> This is unfortunate because students do not understand that "normal" changes over time. This is probably most pronounced wrt race relations (e.g. what passed as normal race relations in 1860 throughout the entire US would be considered outrageously racist now... There were people back then who thought it was an outrage too. Maybe you should be more uncomfortable with the past.
- claydavisss 8y ago
  It is likely that a few centuries from now our degradation of the environment will be subject to a different moral filter...yet how many of us feel uncomfortable buying a new smartphone? The problem of moralizing is that our present "high horses" are wobbly.

OliverJones 8y ago

The Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell has a podcast called "Revisionist History" http://revisionisthistory.com/ http://revisionisthistory.com/ in which he drills into particular episodes of US history. I find it interesting, even though I don't have the academic historical chops to independently assess its accuracy. Example: In the episode called Miss Buchanan's Period of Adjustment, Gladwell explains that Brown v. Topeka Board of Education (the famous school integration case) had a severe consequence. It caused a large fraction of African American schoolteachers and educators to be thrown out of work. He points out that teaching was a major source of 1930s-1950s knowledge-work employment for African Americans was teaching in segregated schools. Quite a few Euro-American school boards obeyed the ruling admitting African American students, but did not employ the teachers from thew schools they left. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-period-of-adjustment http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/13-miss-buchanans-per...

tpurves 8y ago
You have to be careful with Gladwell. His primary gift, is that is he is an incredible storyteller. Take him as entertainment not as a historian or scientist. He goes for surprising and unexpected simple reasons for everything, often by cherry-picking individual facts or annecdotes.
- cujo 8y ago
  Do you have any particular instances of him getting it wrong. I often here this concern, but I'm yet to find someone that can point to a moment and say he got it wrong.
  - chuckgreenman 8y ago
    This article from the Columbia Journalism review is level headed but tough, and brings in a few specific examples: https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_debate.php https://archives.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_gladwellian_deb...
- paulcole 8y ago

yosefzeev 8y ago

This book was a breath of fresh air for me. I had taken a college level course in history not terribly long before this book came out, and I felt that much of the content was wrong or questionable. This book helped confirm my original suspicion something I struggled with for quite some time. I am glad to see the author is pushing forward with what he originally stated. He was right. On another note, it is interesting to see the flag has the gold trim around it in this shot.

finaliteration 8y ago
I also enjoyed this book. However, I find it strange you had that experience in a college level course. I took two terms of US history in college and the professor had zero qualms about calling out discrepancies and shining a light on how history was/is written through certain cultural standards and lenses. Despite not really being a “history person”, they were some of my favorite courses because I felt like there was very little bullshit being presented as absolute truth.
- MrLeap 8y ago
  Different professors are different. The person who taught my college general education literature class used it as an opportunity to unapologetically proselytize the good word of Jesus Christ. 90% of every quiz question or essay prompt was relating every book back to Christianity. I found it offensive, but at this point in my college career the fight had been abraded out of me. I tried doing the assignments dispassionately, writing things like "Taking for granted that there is an omnipotent entity at the helm of the universe, I think the author contends that <rest of my answer>". I'd get my paper back with every secular apologism scribbled out in red, and comments on the margins that were like "JESUS LIVES" and other such academically cool business. Also he was giving me D's. This was a state school, not a religious one. Having fought 25% of my professors that ended up being lunatics no appetite remained in me to take this one to the tribunal. So, I salvaging my grade by feigning conversion. I started writing incomprehensibly unrelated answers to short essay questions. A question might read something like "In what way was Dostoevsky influenced by stoicism." I would answer "God is great!" My reward was A's. I no longer find anything within a normal distribution of human arch-types strange.

pjc50 8y ago

There is an excellent fun little book "1066 and All That", which parodies English history as people remember it from their education. It happens to have been written in 1930 but most of its jokes hold up, and the subset that people remember from that period hasn't changed quite so much. History as remembered by the public is always going to be fragments made into a mythos. The problem is that some of that mythos defines the propaganda contours of the present, whether that's people saying the US civil war wasn't about slavery or whether it's Brexiteers saying that "no deal will be fine because we survived the second world war".

throw2016 8y ago

The sanitized version prevents people from comprehending the scope of the horror and abuse, bequeaths an air of normalcy, and leads to simplistic conclusions in modern generations. At every given point minorities have faced huge resistance for the simplest of things and basic human equality and dignity - and I suspect every adult educated citizen knows this - and the effects of these continue to fester. It's not 'complexity' if you historically discriminate against people they will suffer and there will be far reaching multi generational consequences. This can't be wished away in denial, how can a problem remain unsolved after 200 years? We hold others coming out of hundreds of years of colonialism to standards we often to do adhere to ourselves and which these societies lacking development, wealth and time have not had an opportunity to develop. This becomes another way to not shine the torch on ourselves. Redlining, housing policies, access to education, employment, credit, segregated living and education and the police & justice system will not pass scrutiny. And this has so far escaped global attention and censure but at some point the USA as a whole will be held to account for the condition of the minorities. And at that point the depravity of Pioneer and Volker funded studies by people like Charles Murray - whose work continues to be used even on an educated forums like this regularly, revisionist history and blaming others will not hold because we do not accept these excuses from other countries we hold to account.

Nasrudith 8y ago

Brings to mind another related absurd pedagogical approach the "lies to children" approach of starting by saying that molecules are the smallest object possible. Then atoms. Instead of being truthful and mentioning quarks but saying they are so advanced and deep that even most physicists don't even do anything with them calculation related or otherwise.

quotemstr 8y ago
"Lies to children" is a perfectly good pedagogic approach. Adding caveats to every concept sucks time and energy from learning the broad themes of the subject. When we teach people programming, we start with variables and loops and don't mention page faults and cache poisoning. The same goes for any field. Demanding nuance of a particular kind in history pedagogy, as you see often these days, is just a bad-faith "isolated demand for rigor" that has the effect of privileging the worldview of those demanding the selective nuance. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands-for-rigor/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demands...

millermp12 8y ago

Your "post-truth" is my Narrative Collapse