[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

When did you to go school - the 50s? The notion that education and public attitudes on native Americans and slavery haven't changed is ridiculous. Are you really suggesting that American school textbooks written in the last 40 years do not acknowledge that Americans bought and sold slaves?

“Stereotypically, Mexicans were viewed as lazy compared to European or American workers,” the text reads.

Cortez and the group of historians presented a 54-page report to the Texas board of education and called the book a "political Trojan horse" pushed by conservative education officials, including the textbook's publisher, Cynthia Dunbar. Dunbar, a former member of the Texas board of education, is a Trump supporter and a well-known far-right activist.

At a Trump rally in June, Dunbar spoke on behalf of the GOP nominee, telling a Richmond, Va. crowd that “We want our country back! It has been stolen right from under us!”

Cynthia Dunbar, a former Texas board of education member and vocal Trump supporter, published the offensive textbook.

Dunbar told the Dallas Morning News that she has “no agenda other than trying to make sure that book presents the best material for the students.” She said the board of education is only aware of one error that needs fixing: a passage indicating that English is the official language of the United States.

The Mexican-American Heritage textbook, written by Jaime Riddle and Valarie Angle, has been the source of controversy ever since the Texas Observer cited passages from the preliminary version in May of this year. The problematic passages included one suggesting that Chicanos, a synonym for Mexican Americans, “adopted a revolutionary narrative that opposed Western civilization and wanted to destroy society.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nati...icle-1.2781722

Naomi Reed agrees. A social anthropologist and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, Reed has studied the nexus of race and education, specifically textbooks, for more than a decade. She doesn’t hesitate to draw a straight line between the negative stereotypes and distortions found in some texts and the racist beliefs that lead to racial violence. It’s a point she made in a recent article provocatively titled, “Are Texas Textbooks Making Cops More Trigger Happy?”

Reed focuses her analysis on one popular AP U.S. history textbook, The American Pageant by David Kennedy, which she says is replete with the kind of revisionist history that creates a “white redemption narrative.” Potentially powerful discussions of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, Reed says, are diluted by passages focusing on the negative impact on white people.

“Something bad happens to a Black person and the story is retold or recast as something bad happening to a White person,” she explains. “You see it in textbooks and you see it in the media today in the coverage of police shootings. Somehow the narrative becomes less about black oppression and more about white victimization. It’s everywhere.”

In 2015, a Houston-area parent was appalled to find a caption in her son’s McGraw Hill World Geography textbook that called slaves “workers.” She took to social media and soon the publisher was furiously backtracking, insisting it was only an “editing error,” and promising to deliver a corrected copy. But even after this incident and the countless embarrassments that came before it, the Texas SBOE voted again in late 2015 to stand by the citizen panel charged with reviewing textbooks.

Reed says that until the board implements a proper academic review of classroom materials and other necessary reforms, too many students in Texas – and potentially across the country – will be exposed to a distorted and exclusionary version of history.

http://neatoday.org/2016/07/28/racism-in-textbooks/

From Providence to Pasadena, history teaching in our public schools is in a sorry state. A study by the Rhode Island Historical Society shows that despite the need for for students to know more about the past, history education is getting short shrift in the classrooms.

There are many reasons for this, says Luther Spoehr, who teaches the history of American education at Brown University and serves as a consultant on history teaching across the country . Spoehr says history and civics have taken a back seat in recent years to the relentless push for more science and math..

It’s hard to blame teachers for this. History and civics must be secondary to subjects like math and English that are tested ad nauseam. Our state education department expects students to study American history but doesn’t check their knowledge on standardized tests.

This has led to an attitude of `what’s tested is what’s taught’ according to Spoehr. For better and worse, this is human nature. In the classroom, and on the job, it is natural in a competitive society to master what you know will get you ahead, forsaking stuff that isn’t likely to get you promoted.

The other element that is making history teaching difficult is the nation’s wide political divisions.

The Civil War is a florid example. It’s often hard to find a consensus on great events by professional historians. But most trained in academic history agree that slavery was the major cause of the war. A majority of the public seems to have caught on. A recent poll by the McClatchy news organization and Marist College found that 55 percent of Americans think schools should teach that slavery was the `main reason’ for this war.

Yet, in Texas, state academic standards list slavery third among the causes of the war, after states’ rights and sectionalism. Slavery, says a Republican member of the Texas Board of Education, was merely a side issue in the war.

(Indeed, the Marist poll found that southerners, white people and those more than 60 years old are less supportive than others when it comes to teaching slavery as the prime cause of the war. And Democrats were more likely than Republicans and independents to say slavery should be taught as a primary cause.)

Spoehr says that historical illiteracy is rampant even on his Ivy League campus. He says he is astounded by the number of undergraduates who don’t know what the New Deal was about or who was president during its heyday in the 1930s.

http://ripr.org/post/scott-mackay-co...hools#stream/0

I certainly agree with the point that historical illiteracy is rampant.