Posted on 01/11/2013 8:39:07 AM PST by SeekAndFind
This week the Texas legislature is kicking off its 83rd session in Austin. The funding of public education in the state will be a hot topic as it always is, but this session, the content of public education will be worth a look. The National Association of Scholars today released the findings of a study into the contents of university-level history teaching at two of Texas’ (and the nation’s) most highly regarded public universities, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University, in Bryan-College Station.
Specifically, the NAS looked at the syllabi and reading assignments of classes at both universities, in 85 sections of lower-division American history courses. These classes covered the state requirement, passed by the legislature in 1971, that all undergraduate students at Texas public institutions take two American history courses. What the NAS study found is very disturbing.
The study found that U.S. history courses at both universities strongly emphasize race, class, and gender (RCG) in reading requirements. Fully 78% of faculty members at UT emphasize race, class, and gender, while 50% of faculty members at Texas A&M do the same. Likewise, 78% of UT professors have special research interests in RCG, while 64% at A&M do too.
The study contends that the strong emphasis on RCG crowds out other relevant themes in American history, such as the nation’s intellectual, military, spiritual, and economic history. The emphasis on RCG studies also influences a further narrowing of history subject matter and the tailoring of “special topics” courses, which omit the use of significant primary source documents. These narrowed-focus classes, the study finds, “seem to exist mainly to allow faculty members to teach their special interests.”
The effect: Students at two of Texas’ flagship universities are not being assigned to study such important and influential milestones as the Mayflower Compact or President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. “Only one faculty member,” the study finds, “assigned the ‘Letter from a Birmingham jail’” or Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Major historical figures, from John Dewey to Alexander Graham Bell to Thomas Edison and the Wright brothers, are increasingly being left out of American history courses at both universities. The result of this is that we are losing touch with our history, replacing it with an overemphasis on grievances.
“These trends extend beyond the two flagship Texas universities,” the study report says. “History departments at other universities around the United States share similar characteristics, such as faculty members’ narrow specializations; high emphasis on race, class, and gender; exclusion of key concepts; and failure to provide broad coverage of U.S. history.”
The National Association of Scholars proposes 10 remedies to correct the imbalance of U.S. history teaching in universities. Those remedies include instituting external reviews to ensure that professors are not narrowing history classes down to their particular field of interest, and depoliticizing the teaching of history. “Historians and professors of United States history should counter mission creep by returning to their primary task: handing down the American story, as a whole, to future generations.”
Thanx, SAF
"I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race" -- Barack H. Obama, Dreams From My Father
Ping. I expect this won’t come as a surprise to you.
The degenerate Euroamerican will never even notice what is happening. Indeed, if it is brought to their attention they will applaud the replacement.
I can attest to this. I almost dropped out of sociology graduate studies...the program was nothing more or less recruiting those that would go out and speak to their socialist agenda. The required reading to gather statistics and information for my research even included Mein Kamph, Freidrich and Engels’ The C. Manifesto, Chomsky, et al. When I made my dissertation about a brief study of humanity from Genesis to the F’bomb (f-word) that wasn’t what they gave me the scholarship for. If I hadn’t already spent half it I would’ve dropped out. Good thing I’d already gotten my pick of history studies (real history) back in my master’s program. If I hadn’t been a senior citizen already, and lived through so much current history I wouldn’t have been able to see through it.
So, why does he hate the world so? Is that just typical of an acolyte of the antichrist perhaps, or is he just totally stupid.
Inner conflict. His personal demons eat at his insides.
He feels entitled to respect yet at his core knows that he has done nothing to deserve it, that all of his accomplishments were facilitated by others and built on lies. He hates the part of him that is white but is cut off from being "authentically black."
He is an abandoned child living in the body of the most powerful person in the world.
I feel that if racism is going to be taught in College, we racists should get equal time to present our views .
You can bet the Hispanic KKK type of groups like La Raza, MEChA, La Voz de Aztlan, and like, will scream RACISM.....and the usual cadre of Texas liberals in both GOP and Dems will acquiesce. The Open Borders/Free Trade Globalist/Amnesty Liberal crowd will cave to the Hispanic Hate Groups (And the Black Hate Groups too). Guaranteed
I have a little different take on the "teaching" objective - hide the history of people seeking opportunity and finding it in abundance. If people find out they can make it on their own and they don't have to settle for handouts, their overlords lose control and power over their subjects, which forces the overloads to produce versus tell people how helpless they are, what they must think and do, and how much they are allowed to keep for themselves.
Duh.
That picture has nothing much to do with the problem. The class thing has been a plague for more than a century, and the others joined and started monopolizing curricula in the 60s.
When I went back to college twenty years ago to get my diploma, I had to retake a basic sociology class. The prof's main interest was Indian uh Native Americans. He seriously believe that the federal government was trying to murder all the native americans. The guy's dislike of his students, most of whom didn't share his fanaticism, was apparent. He was easily the rudest piece of work I've ever had for a teacher. Even though the overwhelming majority of my profs had a leftist bent, most were fairly nice people. This guy was an arrogant jerk.
He's a narcissist. He has nothing but love for himself and disdain for others.
My son just finished his first semester at A&M, and took history from a woman from England. I’ll have to ask him about this. He’ll be taking history again this semester.
Very true, if you are not doing RCG these days, then you are either unemployed or an adjunct. Straight up military history? You do not have a prayer of getting a job. This is the fault of state legislatures kowtowing to accreditation bodies. They so fear negative ratings from the liberals running the accreditation bodies that they do nothing to curb faculty ideological excesses.
Here are some steps that could help restore some balance in academia (in no particular order):
1. Republican governors should appoint active conservatives to state college boards.
2. Appointment of conservative trustees to local boards.
3. Do away with faculty organized search committees and place the search and interview process into the hands of administrators. So long as socialists are in control of this process, they are going to hire other socialists.
4. Redefine academic freedom to encompass only the subject matter at hand. Math professors should not have the academic freedom to pontificate on politics in class. If a professor is paid to teach math for 20 hours a week, they should teach math the entire time, not spend half of it on politics.
Thank you. I am a quarter way through my PhD program, and have considered teaching after my (second) retirement from my current line of work. There have been moments when I thought as how doing do would be a good chance to re-insert some healthier thoughts into those otherwise mush-filled heads. But that would not be in keeping with my contract to teach the subject at hand. Conversations outside class are conversations outside class, should anyone ask my views. But class time has been bought by the student or his/her parents, and is therefore the subject of a contract that deserves respect.
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