Teach the white men only
Florida has passed a law governing the teaching of history in public schools. What next, a law on what brand of shoes the students must buy?
The Florida State Board of Education unanimously voted to ban teaching ideas related to critical race theory Thursday, making it one of the largest public school systems to fall in line with conservative efforts across the country to regulate certain classroom instruction of American history.
What’s the betting that they even have much idea what it is?
The rule says in part: “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.”
That’s ludicrous. American history is a vast array of things, and “the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence” doesn’t cover them all! It doesn’t begin to cover them all. The principles are very interesting, and worth learning about, but so are other aspects of the history, including that of the indigenous people and yes you’re damn right the enslaved people. Hey you know what, one of the things you can teach about is the tension between the universal principles on the one hand and the genocide of the indigenous people and enslavement of the imported from Africa people on the other.
The move was a victory for DeSantis, who has been a vocal critic of critical race theory in schools. He told board members, many of whom he appointed, by video before the vote that students should be served with fact-based curricula by teachers who should “not be trying to indoctrinate them with ideology.”
That’s so ignorant. What facts? There’s an infinite number of facts, so how do you decide which facts to teach about? You don’t just order a box of facts from Amazon and then distribute them to the students by alphabetical order. You have to organize the damn “facts,” and the process of doing that is called…brace yourselves…theory. You’re teaching a theory no matter what, so it’s idiotic to think critical race theory is some cuckoo in the nest because it’s not a bushel basket of Facts.
DeSantis added: “I think it’s going to cause a lot of divisions. I think it’ll cause people to think of themselves more as a member of a particular race based on skin color, rather than based on the content of their character and based on their hard work and what they’re trying to accomplish in life.”
He doesn’t think that. Even he’s not that stupid. What he thinks is that the “universal principles” version is more flattering to the country and especially to, yes, white people.
In short he has a bad conscience. He (and all the rest of these goons) don’t want the central importance of removal and enslavement and race to be taught because it doesn’t make us look good. That’s the point of life, right? To be made to look good? Shiny goldy hair, shiny blue suit, shiny pale skin?
Critical race theory is a concept that seeks to understand racism and inequality in the U.S. by exploring and exposing the ways it affects legal and social systems.
The horror! Why would we ever want to do that?
It can be done well or badly, as we’ve already seen. Robin DiAngelo is a damn fool. But the fact that Robin DiAngelo is a fool doesn’t translate to all proponents and scholars of critical race theory are fools or that the subject is stupid or evil.
Excellent! Sounds like they’ll be happy for classrooms to teach about America’s blood soaked past, rejecting the silly dogma that America’s history was defined by the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.
So in Florida, nobody is ever treated any particular way because of the colour of their skin? Tell Trayvon Martin.
Vintage OB. Downloaded, copied, pasted and filed.
Reminds me of a perpetual conversation I used to have with my students.
Student: ‘x source is biased.’
Me: ‘identify for me please an unbiased source.’
Well, that’s stupid. That’s not how you ban CRT. You ban it by prohibiting: racial scapegoating, reduction of individuals to race membership, and racial discrimination. You know, things most of us could agree were bad until five minutes ago when we were told we were racists if we didn’t Do The Work.
Sure, we agree they’re bad, because they’re all pejorative terms. How accurately those pejorative terms describe any given theory or theoretical claim is a separate question.
This controversy has raised in my mind, not for the first time, questions about how history is taught. I know I’ve seen articles making the point that “fact-based” history, dictating a Box O’ Facts, is the wrong way around, that people need to learn how to assess information, where to go for more information, understand how bias works, how to interpret. I’d rather it not be the teachers’ job to “not suppress or distort significant historical events”, but rather to teach how to understand “suppress”, “distort”, and “significant”, and probably “historical”. I’ve been hoping to see articles or book mentions along these lines in the press on this CRT disagreement, but I haven’t seen anything.
Since this brouhaha started, I was pretty sure that my disagreements with CRT and the conservative disagreement with CRT had little to no overlap, and this Florida bill confirms it.
Exactly. My introductory course as a history major started with that, and it appalls me now how surprised I was to learn it. I had good teachers pre-university but I probably wasn’t paying attention, because I often wasn’t then. Anyway yes very first day – unlearn the idea that history=a bunch of facts about Back Then, and learn that there is always a theory, because there has to be, because you’re always deciding which facts (and why, and how factual they really are, and so on) and that deciding is a theory of some kind.
That is the general process, yes. Rather than ban instances, we ban types. Step one: define and agree on a thing that is not to be permitted in principle. Step two: prohibit that thing. Step three: decide whether a given thing fits that definition.
Yep, precisely the reason it is impossible to create a truly unweighted metric; e.g., GPA/QPA. Every unweighted metric is a weighted metric that assigns 1-weight to those data it considers and 0-weight to those it does not.
Ditto. I remember thinking, when my professor assigned our first book review, telling us to find the faults, errors and problems we found in whichever book we chose from the list provided, “What? Errors? Problems? But this book was published and everything. How could it be wrong?
Ah, sweet days of youthful innocence, long since passed.
The whole meta thing – it doesn’t come naturally!
YNnB? – I was fortunate to have gone through that in high school. The biggest teacher of critical thinking in my high school was my Great Books teacher. By the time she was done with us, we were all thinking much more critically, and could actually question whether these were great books, and if so, why. When our parents threw a fit because she included the Communist Manifesto on our reading list, she substituted the book of Matthew. My parents would have been horrified by the way she taught it, and by our discussions, picking out the holes, the flaws, etc. No one in the class was willing to endorse it after we looked at it up and down and sideways – and this was in one of the most religious cities in the nation!
My history teachers were all football coaches; they weren’t great teachers. But I got enough in other classes, and knew that history rested on some spotty documents and a lot of sources that were themselves biased, so I wasn’t as shocked in college.
If we just taught critical thinking properly from early ages, students wouldn’t struggle so hard.
Yes, but then more of them would be using that critical thinking to question the madness of our own society and civilization. That would dig into the profit margins of those who want things to continue just as they are until we drive over the cliff (or hit the wall: I’m not exactly sure which metaphor is most apt.)
First one, then the other I should think.
YnnB:
That’s how I got into skepticism (and thereby here) in the first place, although in a scientific rather than historical context. As a kid, I was a devourer of pop-sci books but after a while, books with the word “quantum” in the titles started appearing which…. didn’t seem quite right. There seemed to be something disjointed between the claims they were making and the evidence they cited.
The feeling that the reason I couldn’t follow the argument might not be because I’m stupid but because the argument was wrong was awful. I felt it almost physically as something like pain or fear, and I still do when I encounter it today.
Something had to be done about it, which led me to Randi. The rest is…er…. history.
@10 I’m going to share some advice I’ve given in the past re developing critical thinking skills. The most common way to do this in an academic context is to identify flaws and errors and omissions in others’ work, and of course it is great fun to do this and share it with a wider audience–as a questioner in a Q&A session, in a letter to the editor, or with some well-placed footnotes in your own work. But I believe first that this fosters a culture of antagonism among people who should be peers, that isn’t helpful or warranted, and second that it’s a game that generally men enjoy more, and are better equipped to play, than women; I’ve spoken with several women who have been put off academic culture, occasionally enough so that they leave academia, by being subject to this game and being forced to play it themselves.
Here are some alternative ways to engage critical thinking about a text or talk:
’How does this compare with other things you’ve read/your own experience?’
’How does the author’s background and experience affect her position and choice of evidence?’
’How would this argument have appeared to its intended audience/to x in x place and time?’
’How could the author’s argument be applied in other contexts?’
’Under what circumstances does the author’s argument make sense, or not make sense?’
‘What evidence would you add, or look for, to strengthen the author’s argument?’