October 11, 2009

So, what happens when leftists seize higher education?

I am both unsurprised that this is a kindergarten teacher, while simultaneously horrified,

Kolowith’s students learn about the explorer’s significance — though they also come away with a more nuanced picture of Columbus than the noble discoverer often portrayed in pop culture and legend.

“I talk about the situation where he didn’t even realize where he was,” Kolowith said. “And we talked about how he was very, very mean, very bossy.”



Very, very mean and very bossy.

Nuance.

http://i180.photobucket.com/albums/x73/doubleplusundeadmeenu/facepalm-1.jpg

Moar,

Although lessons vary, many teachers are trying to present a more balanced perspective of what happened after Columbus reached the Caribbean and the suffering of indigenous populations.


By balanced they mean radical Marxist, Progressive or other vigorously anti-Western interpretations of the history of Columbus and the Western discovery of the Americas. 

“The whole terminology has changed,” said James Kracht, executive associate dean for academic affairs in the Texas A&M College of Education and Human Development. “You don’t hear people using the world ’discovery’ anymore like they used to. ’Columbus discovers America.’ Because how could he discover America if there were already people living here?”


Of course we don't, because most teachers are educated by professors who teach from a position of hostility toward traditional Western thought, interpretation and philosophy, and many teachers aren't educated well enough to recognize that and adjust.  Then there are those that do recognize that, but agree with the underlying philosophies and play along.  The public school system is mostly built around progressive philosophical concepts, so you have that as well.  Then obviously most textbooks and workbooks are designed by people from a higher education background, who are for the most part leftists.  Which is why we get the stupid, "How could he discover it if there were already people there?" nonsense.

In Texas, students start learning in the fifth grade about the “Columbian Exchange” — which consisted not only of gold, crops and goods shipped back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean, but diseases carried by settlers that decimated native populations.


And Europeans picked up and brought back syphilis from the Americas, educators need to quit acting like Westerners waged biological war on Native Americans.  They're bacteria, parasites and viruses, they spread with human contact, except in Madagascar, where they close their damned port every time someone sneezes, it's biology, it happens, especially in an era where people didn't really understand how the spread of disease worked.  I'll also note that the dean I quote above parrots this bullshit on the second page.

They won't teach these kids that the Natives gave Westerners nasty diseases too, because they're taught to teach that America is the bad guy,

In McDonald, Pa., 30 miles southwest of Pittsburgh, fourth-grade students at Fort Cherry Elementary put Columbus on trial this year — charging him with misrepresenting the Spanish crown and thievery. They found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.

“In their own verbiage, he was a bad guy,” teacher Laurie Crawford said.



See what I mean?

America, Marxism's bad guy,



And unfortunately, they'll keep getting away with this too, there's more of these jackass antics in the second page of the article.  People focus on the leftist bullshit spouted about Columbus, but that's only because the material taught is so out of control.  It's still the same leftist bullshit throughout the year, it's just slightly more subtle.  People just don't realize it because most haven't been taught anything about historiography, and that includes people with history degrees. People are not taught anything about how to identify bias in historical works (and yes, that includes your gradeschooler's textbooks), how to recognize cultural styles and biases, sources and their validity, how to separate historical fact from historical interpretation, how to recognize what schools of thought those interpretations and biases came from, and I'm sure I'm missing others, but you get the point. 

Parents need to gain a better understanding of what is going on in school classrooms.  I don't expect grade schoolers to understand these things, but parents do need to learn about this stuff at least on a rudimentary level so that they can review their student's books and what they did in class, and push back as needed.

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