I suppose I can see that, I forget that a lot of times on the web people don't know one as well as in real life, where I'm generally known to be a shameless spewer of historical trivia typically of the "Contrary to popular belief..." type. So I am probably assuming more than was really justified, to me it's basically a proverbial comment, twin to 'history is written by the winners', not an endorsement or a surrender, and I wouldn't expect anyone to think that was my interpretation.




Well, I'm not endorsing OSC on this, merely raising an article written by what I consider a self-described left-centrist who is fairly well-respected intellectually by sci-fi fantasy fans and whose works concentrate much on child education. Obviously I personally am not able to speak about normal HS history classes having not attended them. He actually rants about some of those points in his follow-up article, the one I accidentally originally posted. The specific accuracy of his comments isn't something I meant to address but rather that the NYT seems to be spinning this as the behavior of kooky far-right texans when it's a fairly widespread thing, not far-right versus mainstream but far-left versus everyone else.







Well, as I said, I'm not really trying to back OSC's point-for-point, but one of his comments was about how by pushing history of a certain era to a lower grade you de-emphasize it, since age is a big factor in being able to absorb something and history's complexity as a subject is not correlated to the era under discussion, as opposed to science. You can't teach Newtonian physics to five year olds then teach them arithmetic the next year, but you can teach the civil war without covering AmRev in great detail just as you can teach about early American history without delving into the crusades. Teach 1800-1820 to a five year old and 1860-1880 to a ten year old, and vice versa, and it's a pretty safe bet on which one of those two kids, all things being equal, will remember which period in better and fuller detail. A lot of us feel history of a given epoch, if it needs to be broken into multiple pieces, can just as easily be taught in summary then greater detail, rather than trying to go chronologically, since you really have to do that anyway. Civil war buffs don't proceed from 1860-65, they get the swath then focus on details in no particular order. 1877 was seen as a good natural break when many of those texts were written, since it was about halfways through and fell on a natural break, the end of reconstruction and the essentially the civil war. Now however we have the first hundred years versus the next 130 so clearly the break needs to get moved, as books written beginning then will be increasingly stuffed or summarized compared the other chunk. So shifting from the end of reconstruction to break instead at the beginning of 20th century makes more sense, and preusmably in our lifetimes if the want to split it in two they'll need to push the second half to begin around WWI or after.