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I will give you a concrete example if you want one. By focusing exclusively on the "great people" of the civil rights movement, the education most kids in the U
by whatshisface 3y ago
I will give you a concrete example if you want one. By focusing exclusively on the "great people" of the civil rights movement, the education most kids in the US are getting does not mention the roles in future movements which they are most likely to play. You get an "it's MLK and a handful of main characters, and thousands of extras in the crowd scenes" message from every textbook I've ever seen. No mention of the fact that there were, say, individual legal battles, much less what they were over or how they were won. Kids graduate high school thinking that their only two options are being an era-defining writer or passively reading tweets.
- Spooky23 3y agoThat’s definitely a downside of K-12 education. I always found it depressing that you learned the survey level of US History a half dozen times, each time noticing the inconvenient details filtered out. My favorite whipping boy for this is the Pilgrims, who transition from guys with funny hats who liked turkey and wrapped dead fish around corn to… something else. One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t know what people actually know, and if they’ve been lured into nostalgia for some wonderful past that doesn’t exist, they get angry. The 1619 project controversy was a great example of that. The notion that people managed their human property like property and that people who escaped that system intermarried with runaway or released indentured servants is a “duh” concept. All of this underscores why education is important, and why academic freedom is a critical component of it.