fandomhigh | American History: Lies Your Other Teachers Taught You [Friday, Sept 19, 2014]

Hello, kids, and welcome to the latest installment of Joshua Lyman Really Hates Texas!

He waved a stack of paper that he then slapped onto each student's desk. "Right. Texas is fighting about American history books again. As we talked about in the beginning of the class, who ends up in books, how the story is presented, and making sure that information is presented in a balanced and accurate way is what stops us all from being Fox News watching morons who believe our current president is a Kenyan Muslim terrorist who's carrying ebola personally across the Mexican border."

Stop ranting, Josh.

"When a book is full of white guys, students will get the impression that white guys were the only ones who did anything and that is patently untrue. This current iteration of a history book apparently spends a lot of time talking about Moses and the formation of the US as a Christian nation which is...well, not true. First off, Moses was Jewish. Second of all, it was thousands of years between Moses and Europeans even getting to this continent. Third of all, the separation of religion from the practical aspects of governing a country was way, WAY up on the list of importance for our Founders. Many of the colonies had been founded by people fleeing religious oppression. Thomas Jefferson wrote and I quote, and feel free to forward this to your crazy redneck uncle, 'Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.' You can be me and be gearing up for High Holidays, you can believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, you can worship Zuul and unless you decide that your religion means you can keep slaves, have ten wives, or kill everyone in a fifteen-block radius, the government is supposed to give no kind of a fuck." He shrugged. "Most of the time that's even true."

He leaned back against his desk. "But why does what one state does in a textbook matter on a national level? Texas is freaking huge, and they buy a lot of textbooks. Therefore, the publishers want to make Texas happy so they can make lots of money. We'll discuss this more when we get into why the Confederacy comes off smelling like a rose in a lot of history textbooks and how that's because Texas is in the South.To a lesser extent, this is also why kids in Minnesota have to remember the Alamo." He took a sip from his coffee. "Okay. First we're gonna rant about Texas a bit, then you get a surprise pop quiz where you have to correctly label the states and their capitals because that kind of crap isn't up for debate."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Read the article and discuss! What do you think should be focused on in a history textbook? Should jihad be defined correctly? Should native tribes be acknowledged? Should we just all worship at the altar of Ronald Reagan?

Or should we do what Josh's teacher did and just fiddle around in the pre-Civil War time period until May?

"You're not gonna make everyone happy," Flick said, shaking his head once he'd finished the article. "Just let the kids learn about the presidents, the major wars, and then go from there. I think everyone in America doesn't mind boasting about their favorite president and why certain wars happened."

He shrugged. "Textbooks would be thin and not cost a lot of money either."

"So how would you talk about Vietnam?" Josh asked. "It's a major war."

"That it happened and if people want to know more, they can do independent research," Flick decided.

"Dude, Texas sucks," Johnny said. Yes, that was his contribution.

"And it's hot and full of Republicans," Josh said. "Pass."

Don't worry, Josh. Kathy absolutely had your back on this.

"This is such bullshit," she said, because if their teacher could drop an f-bomb in the lecture, she could correctly ID bullshit as bullshit. "There's more to America than just white people and their contributions. If your book is ignoring history in order to alienate huge swathes of the population while delivering ass-pats to the people who look and think like you, that's not education, it's indoctrination."

Someone had apparently woken up on the very testy side of the bed this morning.

Edited 2014-09-19 14:04 (UTC)

Josh nodded. "Is there a part of learning about your history that should be instilling pride as well?" he asked.

"No, if only because at some point in our history, patriotism turned from something good to creepy jingoistic sentiment," Kathy said. "There's nothing wrong with being proud of your country and making sure that our history books include the good we've done as well as the bad, but I don't think that there needs to specifically be whole sections devoted to making us feel good about ourselves. And maybe if we stopped mythologizing our history, we could move beyond what a group of men thought two hundred and fifty years ago, like their life experiences as rich, white, land-holding aristocrats--whether they called themselves that or not--have anything to with the modern day, long before the age of the internet, automatic assault rifles, and the idea that women and minorities have thoughts and feelings of their own."

WHATEVER, JEFFERSON, KATHY WAS OVER YOU. YOU DIDN'T EVEN FREE YOUR SLAVES IN YOUR WILL.

Josh grinned at her. "Guess I hit a nerve. Nicely argued, Skippy."

"Just wait till we start talking about social justice and who gets a say in what I do with my uterus," Kathy said, giving him a small, pleased smile in return.

"I don't understand," Raven said. "Not just going around murdering people seems like a pretty straightforward idea for a law. Do they think the only reason why anyone would have thought of it was because it was in the Ten Commandments?"

Raven was developing a fairly complicated relationship with the morality of killing, herself, but she was at least reasonably sure the idea that killing each other made for an unstable society was fairly universal.

"They're pretty stupid in Texas?" Josh offered.

"All of them?" Raven said. "Like you said, it's a pretty big place."

"I blame their education system," Josh said, nodding.

"We should just let them secede," Celia offered, because even if she was a little confused on some of the things that were being emphasized or glossed over in the book (who in the devil's name was this Reagan man?), she was fairly annoyed at the idea of anyone trying to whitewash their history. "They've always wanted to, haven't they?"

"Pretty much," Josh said, shrugging.

Jalian sighed. It was going to be another one of those classes, wasn't it? "Who is Moses? And what are they 'batting a thousand' of?"

American History: Lies Your Other Teachers Taught You [Friday, Sept 19, 2014]

Why, Texas, why?

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