Posted on 03/15/2008 1:24:38 PM PDT by Clintonfatigued
"I don't want to read anymore of this!" My son angrily threw his history book on the ground. When he cooled down a little, I asked him what was wrong, and he told me in tears about The Trail Of Tears. He couldn't take it. He didn't want to face the fact that our blessed Nation could do something so wrong. He couldn't believe that a lot of our Founding Fathers had been slave owners that had written about freedom while benefitting from the fruits of slave ownership. He was shutting down before my very eyes as to the love for America I had always tried to instill in him.
I knew I had my work cut out for me. I knew that unless I was able to get through to him very soon, the road to rebuilding his inner red, white and blue would be a long one. Fortunately for him and me both, I know a great deal about American history. I attacked the task with a relish and devotion a father feels for his son and a patriot feels for his country. I read what he had read, and realized just how one-sided and biased his book really was.
The way the book portrayed slavery was historical malpractrice. It gave cursory notice that there was such a thing as the abolitionist. It gave practically no notice to the fact that many, many, WHITE Americans risked their lives and freedoms to fight against this institutionalized evil. It pointed out with relish how the south had been built upon slavery, but it miserably failed to show how slavery destroyed the south in the end.
(Excerpt) Read more at redstate.com ...
The books used in school have never been interesting or inspiring, but they’ve clearly gotten worse.
As for this article, it sounds like the Dad would do a better job of teaching history than the school (Metmom, that’s your cue!).
I don’t think every moment of American history would make every American proud. Ever thought long and hard about the Native Americans? Ever tried to put yourself in the shoes of one of those folks?
Davy Crockett was an indentured servant and it was the Democrats under Andrew Jackson that were responsible for the trail of tears. They destroyed Davy politically aand financially because he opposed the Democrats land grab. Davy left Tenn and went to Texas and the rest is history.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
To be a good parent of a government institutionalized child is FAR, FAR, FAR, more work than merely homeschooling them from the start.
It is MUCH more work to “deprogram” a child every night than it is to simply teach them good principles from the beginning!
To do a good job with a government institutionalized child, a parent would need to read every textbook, quiz the child on all classroom discussion and teaching, review the syllabuses, and read all literature assigned. The parent would need to read all the books on the suggested reading list because the other children are reading them and discussing them in class! The parent must also be current on all the fads, music, dances, movies, video games and other cultural flotsam and jetsam and other sewage of the government indoctrination camp.
It’s the human condition. As Winston Churchill remarked in 1947, “democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time.”
Injustices, yes. Plenty of them, from indenture to slavery to affirmative action to Dukelax. But lots of luck finding something better.
I would say there should be a profitable future for an enterprising lawyer to sue the public schools and publishers for teaching lies. Didn;t a Brit just do that with global warming? The armor of personal liability needs to be stripped from public school teachers. The public provides at their own expense the shield of sovereign immunity. Private school teachers are not shielded. Why should public school teachers be shielded?
For liberals, America is an evil malevolence that deserves scorn, & to have its ass kicked.
There’s no denying that it was a shameful part of our history. And yes, America’s history is far from ideal. But that doens’t mean we should wallow in it, which this history book clearly does.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
400 years after Columbus, American Indians were still living a stone age existence! Sorry, but I really do have trouble putting myself in those backward and primitive moccasins!
Amen. Freedon aint free! Somebody somewhere had to pay for it.
The much-lauded k12 curriculum used by so many charter schools, uses Joy Hakim’s anti-American trash for American history in one of the elementary grades. First time I saw it, I was horrified.
We homeschooled recently using Within The Americas (for American Literature). Copyright 1949 by Ginn & Co.
Every page is like a Fourth of July parade, full of the American spirit, the love of God and country. There’s not a public school in this country today that wouldn’t ban this book or throw it in the dumpster.
For American history I’d recommend the old Annals of America series and a lot of parent instruction. We also purchased a number of old films on ebay that were used in schools before the left turned schools into Marxist indoctrination camps.
Never trust a history book written after 1970. Go to ebay or some old book store and seek the gold. It’s for your child’s mind!
The public school approach to U.S. history, portraying our country as evil and something to be ashamed of, can be overcome at home...if you take the time and make the effort to do so. I considered this 'remedial teaching' at home to be a lot more important than sports...and I acted according to my priorities for my son. I believe it paid off. Today, at 28, my son is a patriot, a political conservative and knowledgeable about his nation's history.
On the other hand, good luck finding a school textbook that mentions that some Native American tribes enslaved members of others, or that some of them enjoyed removing the scalps of their enemies from other tribes. Or that many (probably most) of the black people brought here from Africa as slaves were captured and sold to the white slave traders by other African black people.
I’ve been using “A Patriot’s History of the United States” as a reference book with my kids. We’ve talked about the Westward Expansion, the Trail of Tears, slavery, etc. and I’ve taught them that, yes, some Americans were cruel to Indians, but some Indians were cruel to the white settlers. There are good and bad people in any culture. That seems to make sense to my daughter, age 8.5.
You are exactly right. Most Indians died of old world diseases brought by Europeans. The first Spaniards brought the diseases which spread rapidly throughout the Americas. By time the English and Northern Europeans arrived, the majority of North American Indians had vanished. So, students, especially those from backward societies, should be taught about the potential for disease borne calamities.
Yes, Europeans fought with the Indian survivors. The Indians too fought against Europeans, many who were looking for some land to farm. The Indian idea a whole continent belonged to them is just their point of view. Any society that wants to claim a vast territory has had to provide the military means to do so. That too is a lesson in itself. The crap about Europeans enslaving and murdering whole populations needs to be corrected. Most of the people who came into contact with Indians were hunters and farmers. Did they enslave Indians?
thru nightly 'deprogramming' also risks his getting terrible grades by being one of them ghastly 'individuals'! Yep, the schools success at programming his inner RED will be tough to deprogramme. Specially if he wants to get into college where the RED programming will continue! Oh, and did we mention that the planet is sliding to the left faster than these elections can generate pinko pols! Right in a Left world can be lonely at times! best of luck to him...nurture his entreprenneurial spirit and problem solving!
Good luck finding one which mentions free blacks who owned slaves, too.
Our Gummint schools simply use the CBS teaching method...fake but accurate!
read later
When my 2-year old gets to school age, if we don’t homeschool him, I’m thinking of starting an extra-curricular history club for like minded parents where we study REAL American history. Maybe meet one or two times per month for an hour or two. Get some good speakers, do activities, etc. Might make a big difference.
I am willing to bet that very few families can not afford private school or homeschool. I am also willing to bet that a **LOT** of families are unwilling to significantly downsize.
As you drive down the freeway this week please notice all the brand new trucks and cars. Please glance up at the mini-mansions on the hill. EVERYONE of those people can (or could when they signed for those cars or homes) afford private school or homeschool. EVERYONE! Each of these people are totally addicted to the government free babysitting, in denial about how morally corrupt the Marxist indoctrination camps really are, or they are liberal/Marxists themselves and perfectly willing to have your taxes pay for their preferred religious, cultural, and political indoctrination of their children!
It is MUCH more work to “deprogram” a child every night than it is to simply teach them good principles from the beginning! (please read post #6)
It’s all relative, too. The Trail of Tears was one of the saddest episodes in US history. No reason why it shouldn’t be taught, but not at the expense of all the good things that happened, too. An entire book on this topic is inappropriate.
Also, if they are going to study history, they should study history. Which was worse, to belong to the Indian tribe that went on the Trail of Tears to its own reservation? Or to belong to one of the South American tribes that were enslaved and had their living hearts cut out?
For that matter, although slavery was an evil and a blot on our history, most American slaves had it far better here than they did in Africa, where they would have been enslaved by REALLY cruel slavemasters, or died at an early age. That doesn’t excuse slavery but it puts it into context as far from being a unique evil. White Europeans learned all about slavery from the Arabs and the Africans.
As a child/young man, Ben Franklin was indentured to his brother IIRC.
A Founding Father was once no more than a slave.
Do you honestly think one or two hours a month can make a difference?
It would be like using a water pistol to put out a forest fire. As one poster stated (paraphrasing)( I forget who), “It would be like trying to throw a grape at Jupiter!”
Please, do all you can to make homeschooling happen.
And themselves. Vikings routinely sacked Ireland and England and took slaves.
I hate those that think that somehow America was the sole source of slavery in the world. Pretty much every race and/or nation on the planet, has enslaved every other race/nation at some point in time.
A small correction - if I recall correctly, it was the French who taught the Indians of North America to scalp their enemies. It was how the French paid up during the French & Indian war.
Amazingly, if we do the math, and one or two people stand up to a biased teacher, more than one child can get a good public education. If we cut and run, we’ve allowing liberal bias in our schools. And to complain about that liberal bias while not doing anything about it is....
_______________________.
In the ancient world, virtually everyone practiced slavery. Also in pre-Columbian Amerca, India, China, and everywhere else.
Slavery remained for a while when the Roman Emperors converted, but over the course of the middle ages it gradually disappeared from Christian Europe.
The Vikings, of course, were not Christian in their early raiding days, so there was slavery on the perimeters of Europe, in Viking lands and in Muslim lands. And of course there were serfs, not exactly slaves but not too much better off.
But slavery gradually died out, until it was revived among Europeans in the Age of Exploration. Europe somewhat hypocritically kept it out of the home territories, but profited from it on colonial plantations.
The Pope spoke out against it. English Evangelicals spoke out against it. New England Protestants spoke out against it.
What all that clearly states is that, with the usual exceptions and backslidings, Christianity was the basic force that did away with slavery in the world, even though the Bible does not EXPLICITLY condemn it, as Southern preachers correctly pointed out in the nineteenth century.
But the Bible does make it clear that all men, Jew or Greek, slave or free, are equal in the eyes of God—which was enough to persuade Christians to do away with that institution over the long run.
Scythia
Scalping was practiced by the ancient Scythians of Eurasia. Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote of the Scythians in 440 BC: "The Scythian soldier scrapes the scalp clean of flesh and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps and hangs them from his bridle rein; the greater the number of such napkins that a man can show, the more highly is he esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks by sewing a quantity of these scalps together".
Northern Europe
Scalps were taken in wars between the Visigoths, the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century according to the writings of Abbott Emmanuel H. D. Domenech. His sources included the decalvare of the ancient Germans, the capillos et cutem detrahere of the code of the Visigoths, and the Annals of Flodoard.
The French encouraged scalping in the French and Indian War, and Governor Morris ordered the British settlers to scalp their enemies in return payment. But scalping seems to have been practiced earlier among the Indians, before the white settlers came. So the French encouraged scalping, but didn’t invent it.
It was also practiced by various other societies—by the French during the dark ages, by the early Scythians, and apparently by other peoples as well.
Various other practices have also been followed to collect rewards or gain respect for killing the enemy—for example, collecting their ears.
That doesn't really represent the situation of the Cherokee in the 1830s. But if believing that helps you justify what the US Government did, by all means go for it.
Those “people” are children.
No, it is not moral to use children to fight an adult political, cultural, and religious philosophical civil war. In every war there are casualties. The hearts of minds of children should NOT be an acceptable causality.
1) Remove your own children.
2) Organize with other parents to combat the government school nuttiness if your wish.
3) But,,,The most effective strategy is to work to close down the government schools.
How to permanently shut down every government school in the nation:
Conservatives ( Christian and non-Christian) should set up private scholarship foundations that would award private vouchers to students attending conservative private schools. The foundations could also award grants to teachers willing to set up inexpensive mini-schools, one room school houses, virtual schools, tutoring centers, and homeschool cooperatives.
If colleges and universities can have endowments in the BILLIONS then conservatives could give every child in this nation a FREE, world class, conservative, K-12 education! They COULD do this, if they would STOP cooking like frogs in a pot!
Road trip! Visit the battlefields........Works wonders. Get little miniatures!
If you can.
Band together with parents and homeschool. What does day care teach anyway?
Here is a breaking news story from the August 1873 Chicago Tribune reporting on a Sioux attack on the Pawnee, it is very interesting.
Or that mentions that one of the first slave owners in Virginia was a black man.
The American Indians fought amongst themselves and killed each other. If they’d united and stuck together, they could have thrown the white man into the ocean.
Indentured servants weren't forced into service.
They were poor peasants without land and without any hope of having land or a home of their own or personal freedom.
People who longed to come to the new world and have hopes of freedom and ownership that would be forever impossible to them in their homeland, signed a contract that, in return for paid passage and room and board for 4 to 7 years, they would, at the end of that time, in the case of the Plymouth servants, be given their own piece of land - upon which they could do as they pleased - take timber from the land and build their own house and they could decide by what trade they would make their living, after having learned a trade, blacksmithing, for example, during their contract time. Some went on to become well respected community leaders and very successful on their own - whereas, in the old country, their condition would have stayed the same all their lives.
I wonder how many people today might be willing to so work for someone else for a few years in return for several acres of land and total freedom, especially if they knew they would never otherwise be able to get it?
It was a different time, a different culture. We make a mistake to measure it by today.
“If we cut and run, we’ve allowing liberal bias in our schools. And to complain about that liberal bias while not doing anything about it is...”
You are absolutely correct. However, don’t waste your time discussing this with “wintertime”. It’s like talking to a brick wall. wintertime has surrendered the field to the enemy. There is a quote that goes, “All it takes for evil men to win is for good men to stand by and do nothing.” wintertime advocates retreat into one’s own personel cloister. That is not going to change our country for the better.
I wonder how many blacks today realize that MLK Jr. was a - gasp = Republican?
I wonder how many know that it was not LBJ, but Ike that enacted the Civil Rights Act?
I wonder how many know that the KKK was a Democrat organization?
The whole history of fighting for the rights of blacks was the Republicans fighting Democrats for those rights.
I wonder how many realize that the Republican black leaders today are the one who are following MLK Jr.'s DREAM?
They could start by looking at the web sight of the Republican blacks - and what they don't believe, they can check up on by just GOGGLING
http://www.nationalblackrepublicans.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=pages.DYK-Unveiled%20Democrats%20Racist%20Past&tp_preview=true
Not all parents are as self-indulgent as you seem to believe. I'm a supporter of homeschooling but homeschooling takes time and resources that many parents simply don't possess. We didn't, although this was close to twenty years ago. Working folks have high taxes to pay as well as all the usual bills. Private schools are not always available and most of the secular schools aren't much better, in terms of curriculum, than the public indoctrination centers.
In my son's case, the public school had my son for 7 hours a day and the American History class was 50 minutes long. I spent hundreds of hours with my son (evenings and weekends as well as all summer) using every opportunity to 'teach' him accurate U.S. history and why America was a great country, despite it's past mistakes and sometimes corrupt leaders.
In the summertime, he eagerly listened to Rush Limbaugh with me when I was home and asked me to tape the show for him, when I could. I did. For Christmas, he gave me subscriptions to conservative magazines and newsletters that we later shared. As he grew older, we occasionally talked politics at the dinner table. My son was raised in a Christian home by politically conservative parents and he reflects that as an adult.
I did caution him to 'play the game' and give the answers the teachers wanted on the 'history' tests and to refrain from challenging the teacher on the facts, as he was vulnerable to her wrath and he just wanted to get through public school. He did. He graduated from a small, private university in 2001. He is a hardcore conservative...and he isn't going to vote for Mccain in November.
I'm not belittling anyone but it sure seems to me that Irish,Scott,and Welsh indentured immigrants have been belittled.
The Cherokees are getting sued for dis-inheriting Freedmen Cherokee freedmen are the descendants of black slaves and Cherokee owners. Native Americans owning slaves isn’t mentioned much. Neither is the fact that a lot of tribes owned slaves of other tribes as well.
White Christianss didn’t create slavery. They were merely the only ones to end it.
Most American History and World History texts used in schools are based on the work of leftist professors. Trust me, I’ve met a few.
What about the inconvenient part of the white slave traders buying their slaves from black chieftains that first captured them and brought them to the coast?
White men dared not go inland in Africa.
What about all the slaughter that is going on all over Africa in countries run by black despots - and slaughtering rival ethnic groups be the tens of thousands -
Oh, sorry, I forgot - we don't look at those things.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.