Posted on 12/11/2013 12:44:35 PM PST by Crapgame
Freepers, as an adjunct professor of humanities, I am most interested in your opinions on American historiography and education.
I agree with those who fingered Dewey and the advent of social studies. More recently, the Zinn text which insures the few students who actually get a history course will get the anti-American version.
I graduated from school in 1969. I loved history. But now as I look back I can see my teacher was very liberal.
Thomas Dewey was “the little man on the wedding cake” who lost to FDR in 1944 and to Truman in 1948. If Dewey had won in 1948, Earl Warren would have become Vice President. If Dewey had then been re-elected in 1952, we wouldn’t have had a Warren Court.
“Who”? Or “what”?
I guess the teachers unions might be to blame.
I think Darwin and Nietzsche have profoundly harmed our culture.
Supreme Courts have hurt us by their constant intrusion upon the culture—eliminating prayer, for instance.
When I taught, my principle sent me to a social studies workshop two years ago to learn the new ss curriculum for the elementary level at our intermediary school district. I was shocked and dismayed to learn, and so were a few of the other teacher in attendance, that THE ONLY GRADE LEVEL AT WHICH STUDENTS ARE EXPOSED TO COLONIAL AND EARLY AMERICA, INCLUDING ALL OF THE FOUNDING DOCUMENTS IS IN FIFTH GRADE!!!!! High school will not even touch on it. This is in Michigan, and I’m sure this was in anticipation of the Common Core. I was shocked and let the facilitator know. He seemed shocked that I would be concerned that 5th grade would be the only time students would be exposed to our American history. I remember when I was in high school, 11th grade was devoted entirely to U.S. History.
As to who caused the most damage, it's hard to say. William Appleman Williams arguably started "Cold War revisionism"--the idea tha the US and the West, not the Soviets, started the conflict--with his The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: World, 1959), a trend that picked up steam as Denna F. Fleming, Gar Alperovitz, Gabriel Kolko and others picked up the torch. Today, the "revisionist" view of the Cold War seems to predominate in academia.
Other culprits include Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose "deconstructionist" ideas began percolating through academia beginning in the 1970's and eventually reached the K through 12 curriculum. And, of course, there are the purveyors of "progressive" education from John Dewey forward.
John Dewey was the philosopher and promoter of “progressive” education. Thomas Dewey was the New York governor and presidential hopeful.
I think we can trace this back to Horace Mann in the mid nineteenth century. He was a prime mover to put education under the control of the government. Nothing good has come of this.
Taking “your kids out of public ( socialist-entitlement) school” **is** the answer!
Thing about it.
There are entire counties and whole states where, if conservatives and God-fearing parents, removed their kids the entire corrupt and evil system would immediately collapse.
All schools ( private and socialist-entitlement schools) require two things: 1) students;2) Money. Starve the socialist-entitlement indoctrination camps of both and the beast disappears.
On the other hand, if Dewey had been re-elected in 1952, Vice President Warren might have been elected president in 1956. Then, instead of the Warren Court, we might have had the Abt Court or the Crockett Court.
Agreed. The sodomization of our history seems to be in the early stages, but I bet that in 50 years or a generation, it will not be factually the same. The libtards will have “cleaned it up” so much to reflect their agenda that what we were taught will make us extremists or racists, or some other -ist. I just hope that these scum do not have access to the data storage systems to wipe the real American History it from existence.
Then there was the "race, gender, class" based pedagogy of the last few decades. It sounds like that's what's most on your mind. Teachers have been political liberal for some time, but at least they had to engage with facts and actual political history. The RGC approach meant that they could simply dismiss much of what had been taught earlier.
I wouldn't be that hard on "social studies" though. It was largely introduced in the earlier grades because pupils weren't thought ready for more adult and complicated history. In and of itself, that didn't prevent schools from teaching history later on. To be sure, the fads of progressive high schools back in the 40s and 50s were pretty ridiculous, but most high schools never threw over some teaching of American history over for social studies projects.
Your statement implies that at some point there wasn't a problem and things were OK. Gee! If we could just go back to those better times the schools would be fixed. Some day the same will be said about Obamacare.
Please read John Gatto.
**Government owned and run, compulsory, single-payer, and collectivist K-12 schools was a Prog idea from the beginning in the mid1800s to early 1900s.
** The Progs have always controlled curriculum development and teacher training.
** The Progs have always been pushing at the edges of societies morals and ethics.
** The Progs have always pushed for greater and greater consolidation, state, and federal control.
** The Progs have always pushed for increasing secularization until, now, we have utterly godless schools that are not and never have been religiously neutral.
A few years ago, I read an interview by an instructor at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, Calif. who complained that her students didn't know the difference between wails, Wales and whales.
Do you HAVE TO use that book?
Can you choose another?
Can you make a stand to push for another book to teach your college students YOUR course, not THE course?
Do you have to teach 'to the book' or can you skim it and assign readings of other books or even archive newspaper stories (which would be very cool!)?
“who in your collective opinion did more to destroy the teaching of history at the primary level for American children?”
Undoubtedly, it was the socialist-communist Thomas W. Valentine, New York Teacher’s Association, and his founding of the National Teacher’s Association (NTA) that merged with the American Teacher’s Association (ATA) to produce their successor, the National Education Association (NEA). The NEA subsequently championed socialist, Progressive, and communist causes through indoctirnation of students and American school administrations and administrators. The NTA unsuccessfully attempted to nationalize the schools of the United States and pattern their administration and curriculum after the Prussian authoritarian style of education in the post civil War era. This failure was increasingly reversed going into the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration, who was particularly influential in advancing their goals. The NEA was responsible for the lobbying efforts which established the Department of Education in the U.S. Government.
The NEA has been instrumental in working with members of the communist and socialist organizations and members to promote their causes throughout more than 150 years of U.S. history.
150 years is the age of our modern system of collectivist, compulsory, and single-payer schools. In other words, the schools were corrupt from the beginning and there was no magical year where the compulsory schools were OK.
It just bugs me when I see Freepers, who should know better, write, “My school in the 50s taught ‘x’”, or “It's the unions.”, and “Get rid of the Department of Education”.
I am **amazed** that so few conservatives recognize that collectivist government schools was EVIL from the beginning!
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