"optimism, inclusion, and honesty" Topic

link

Not a bad start, I agree, though the devil is in the details. Teachers know that the content bucket is always full to overflowing, so including more of new THIS means excluding some of old THAT. Honesty (is that the same as truth?) is good, and so is optimism, but they may clash.

Still, as basic principles go, not bad.

+1 doc mcb. Probably resonates more to those who are not down on US than those who feel they have an ax to grind.

Excellent piece, Doc. Thanks for the link.

It is more of a leftward bent than I like, but the ideas in and of themselves seem like good places to begin. Implementation would still be fractious, I fear.

Agree, doc. Vaguely annoying language, but a fundamentally sound program. Problem is, it assumes a good will I really don't think is there.

Mind you, I'd love to be wrong.

robert, yes, pretty much.

I agree with rp's view and am ery glad to be retired from teaching History these days.

Winston Churchill is supposed to have said "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities."

As an American, I think he kind of overstated his case. Still, there is no denying that our history, is complex, convoluted, and nuanced. A couple examples from out here in fly-over country:

In 1942, an executive order of the Roosevelt administration allowed incarceration of Japanese-Americans. Republican Governor Ralph Carr's response was to the effect that there were no Japanese in his state, only loyal Colorado citizens.

An 1877 Kansas law allowed cities of the first class (over 15,000 people) to establish racially segregated elementary schools. By 1954, when this law was struck down by the Supreme Court's decision in Brown et al vs The Topeka Board of Education, there were 12 cities of the first class in Kansas, and one of them, despite having been a city of the first class for over 40 years, had never established any segregated schools.

Looking back, from 75 years perspective, a vast majority of Americans would back Governor Carr and the people of Hutchinson, Kansas, for having done the right thing. The challenge is to explain this, and yet not totally demonize people like the governor of a neighboring state who suggested his state could take in more Japanese because they had plenty of trees to hang 'em from.

Grelber

Too often history is looked back on either through the lense of our own era's sensibilities or through a filter of a specific agenda with an aim to increase power of one group, usually at the expense of another.

CS Lewis observed, during WWII and probably during the Blitz, that ordinary Brits would loudly proclaim their hatred for Germans in general, but when a Luftwaffe pilot was shot down the authorities would find him being fed tea in a nearby farmer's kitchen. It is human to have different attitudes about a general group and a specific member of that group.

Winston Churchill's remark is actually spot on— the American governmental system tends to favor eventually "doing the right thing," even if it does not tend to favor doing it immediately. It is structured to favor little or no change, while allowing for sudden and big change, but generally supporting gradual change over time as the people change their own perspectives. Sometimes (often) the sudden and big change is not good (but not always), and the gradual change is better (but not always). We can see this happening today— though which change is better and which is not is obviously very much a matter of opinion, and enters into current politics, which is verboten here. Sometimes it is the rugged hold-out, whether a person or a city or a state, which acts as the anchor against the radical action and either halts it or pulls the country back from that action. Sometimes it is the innovative individual (or city or state) which stands as the example that brings change forward. Both are valuable, and both are allowed a place in the American system. Sometimes we are in a struggle against our better natures; sometimes we are in a struggle to find them.

As it relates to history, the only way we can discover which is happening at any given time is to be open to examining our past with honesty, but not in a spirit of either condemnation or hagiography. Both are lenses which will serve us ill. Nevertheless, I don't think it's possible for anyone to be entirely objective about history. Even the choice of what to focus on can in and of itself be subjective— if I look at this element and not that one, I have made a subjective choice. And if I highlight this characteristic (bad or good) and downplay that characteristic (bad or good) I am also making a subjective choice. As someone once observed, "History is written by historians," meaning that human beings with an interest in history write it, and these human beings necessarily bring points of view and areas of interest to their writing, whether they intend to or not. They transmit their focus, even if they claim not to have one, and make the elements appear greater than the whole simply in the matters of what they choose to write about and what they choose not to. And that will always be true, no matter how objective the historian is purported to be.

Some people view history as an objective record of past events.

Some people view history as a malleable propaganda device to either lead or mislead the public.

Some people have trouble distinguishing one from the other.

B