American textbooks are whitewashed

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Meanwhile, FCPS was forced to skip a section on John Henry this year because they were scared 3rd graders would ask too many questions.

Aren't they supposed to ask questions? That how they learn.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in Texas (HS class of ‘89) and I assure you, the textbooks covered the Civil War as a MAJOR thing that was definitely about slavery. We covered slavery, Dred Scott, the Underground Railroad, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, lynchings, the Jim Crow laws, Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, MLK Jr., Frederich Douglas, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, Langston Hughes, Buffalo Soldiers, Tuskegee Airmen, etc.

We also covered broken treaties with Native Americans, the Trail of Tears, massacres, widespread buffalo slaughter, reservations and reservation schools, Windtalkers, etc.

We covered Japanese internment camps and Chinese exclusion laws.

We covered Caesar Chavez and migrant workers.

The textbooks weren’t perfect. There is always room for improvement in anything. My teachers (like good teachers everywhere) occasionally supplemented with additional materials to provide additional information and to make it more interesting, but the textbooks provided a strong foundation and framework to expand upon. On occasion, the textbooks might have a typo or factual error, but that was after they had been edited and reviewed by teams of subject matter experts and consequently reviewed and selected by the state. I had far more confidence in them than I do with a haphazard curriculum put together by a local school district.

NP. I grew up in NC and they did not teach this stuff you mention. The Civil War was definitely taught as op described it. I was taught it had little to do with slavery and more to do with states rights and Northerners attacking Southerners on their land. We were taught that very few people were slave owners. We never learned much about Native Americans. Even worse we lived close to a fairly sizable population of Native Americans and never learned about them.

Wow, and did you all generally believe what you were taught or did you know they were glossing over just about everything?

I’m not the PP but the only way you find out what was missing in your education is to keep educating yourself as an adult.

I found out in college that my school system left out a lot about the Cold War. We learned all about Russia wanting to take over the world with communism. The Soviet Union wasn’t enough.

My high school didn’t talk about “both side”. The US was so obsessed with the evils of communism that our CIA was behind many coups in South America and propping up dictators which they saw as preferable to socialist leaders. The most well known was Chile. During the early 70s Chile had a democratically elected leader, Allende, who was liberal/socialist. The CIA bankrolled the coup d’Etat and installed Pinochet as dictator.

Discuss the Cold War with your teens and see how well your teachers are doing.

Our high school covers everything you wrote in your long paragraph. This information is covered in both history and literature classes (through Central American literature).

[Anonymous]

Try studying for each test off of poorly formatted handouts. Scraps of loose papers from home schooled online sources. Colored in random worksheets. Multiple short video links. And, no main textbook. That’s how every subject is in FCPS. There is no big picture to small picture. There are no nicely throughout chapters of logical information. There is no notebook of notes. There are no reading passages of text and then answer the questions. It’s like we are in a third world.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You can move to another country if you don’t like public education in the us.

OK, King George?

Or we can overthrow the tyrants like good Americans do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Try studying for each test off of poorly formatted handouts. Scraps of loose papers from home schooled online sources. Colored in random worksheets. Multiple short video links. And, no main textbook. That’s how every subject is in FCPS. There is no big picture to small picture. There are no nicely throughout chapters of logical information. There is no notebook of notes. There are no reading passages of text and then answer the questions. It’s like we are in a third world.

+1 I agree. Random, disjointed topics are strung out over the units with no cohesion. Students are reading less because there is no core text. Digital words are housed on their computers and they hit Crrl-F to find information rather than reading a chapter and critically analyzing a question to come up with an answer. Kids are putting math problems into AI instead of struggling to come up with the answer on there own.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What textbooks? MCPS doesn't use them except in a few classes.

If you read carefully I was talking about inaccurate history books used in states like Virginia through the 1980s and some in early 2000s. Going back to the type of censored textbooks that were previously used would create a bigger divide between the states who will agree to leave out significant parts of American history and the minority of states who will continue to accurately teach American history.

I don’t want my child learning history online. While the teacher is talking about the Cold War, half the class will be playing Minecraft. Give me textbooks. I send my child to school to learn, not to get more time on a screen.

And what makes you think learning history online in a district that censors the past is going to be any different than using a textbook? The problem isn’t the source; it’s the person selecting the content.

This. Plus it is so much harder for parents to know what kids are learning and help them study for quizzes/tests with material online. It was so much simpler when teachers said there’d be a
Test over chapter 3, and and/or parents could open the book to chapter 3

Everything is recorded on their Chromebook! It’s so easy. The screen each teacher / subject in a box. Below the box is what is due and when. Open the box and all the information on what was complete and what needs to be done.

Teachers also send emails on projects and other activities.

What technological utopian school does your DC go to?

People discuss seeing their missing assignments online. Is it not on the Chromebook?

One thing I noticed is some of the homework on Chromebook makes it impossible to cheat by someone giving you the answers or by just skimming the material. One example in a geography class is there is a 30-45 minute video of a specific country broken into four segments. After each segment there will be a page of questions. You can’t fast forward or skip any of it. For example there was a section on Japan related to an overfishing problem. They went into detail about the problem, asked questions about the facts given and questioned how you think you would help solve the problem.

This makes the material much easier to absorb and retain. If you just read a paper straight through you might drift off in the middle.

They also have paper with outlined countries but no names. You need to write in the names and capitals. This has always been done so not everything is online.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I grew up in Texas (HS class of ‘89) and I assure you, the textbooks covered the Civil War as a MAJOR thing that was definitely about slavery. We covered slavery, Dred Scott, the Underground Railroad, Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, lynchings, the Jim Crow laws, Plessy v Ferguson, Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, MLK Jr., Frederich Douglas, Harriet Tubman, George Washington Carver, Langston Hughes, Buffalo Soldiers, Tuskegee Airmen, etc.

We also covered broken treaties with Native Americans, the Trail of Tears, massacres, widespread buffalo slaughter, reservations and reservation schools, Windtalkers, etc.

We covered Japanese internment camps and Chinese exclusion laws.

We covered Caesar Chavez and migrant workers.

The textbooks weren’t perfect. There is always room for improvement in anything. My teachers (like good teachers everywhere) occasionally supplemented with additional materials to provide additional information and to make it more interesting, but the textbooks provided a strong foundation and framework to expand upon. On occasion, the textbooks might have a typo or factual error, but that was after they had been edited and reviewed by teams of subject matter experts and consequently reviewed and selected by the state. I had far more confidence in them than I do with a haphazard curriculum put together by a local school district.

NP. I grew up in NC and they did not teach this stuff you mention. The Civil War was definitely taught as op described it. I was taught it had little to do with slavery and more to do with states rights and Northerners attacking Southerners on their land. We were taught that very few people were slave owners. We never learned much about Native Americans. Even worse we lived close to a fairly sizable population of Native Americans and never learned about them.

Wow, and did you all generally believe what you were taught or did you know they were glossing over just about everything?

I’m not the PP but the only way you find out what was missing in your education is to keep educating yourself as an adult.

I found out in college that my school system left out a lot about the Cold War. We learned all about Russia wanting to take over the world with communism. The Soviet Union wasn’t enough.

My high school didn’t talk about “both side”. The US was so obsessed with the evils of communism that our CIA was behind many coups in South America and propping up dictators which they saw as preferable to socialist leaders. The most well known was Chile. During the early 70s Chile had a democratically elected leader, Allende, who was liberal/socialist. The CIA bankrolled the coup d’Etat and installed Pinochet as dictator.

Discuss the Cold War with your teens and see how well your teachers are doing.

Our high school covers everything you wrote in your long paragraph. This information is covered in both history and literature classes (through Central American literature).

That’s good. Studies show it’s still not common to get into detail about the countries we interfered with and the damage done.

History books should not ignore American Imperialism interferences in South America.
U.S. intervention in the 1970s and 1980s included the U.S. government trained and financed military dictatorships and death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.

They should learn about the former Schools of Americas in Fort Benning which taught
Combat skills through the 90s to South American military. There is documentation that this school’s graduates led military armies in torture, murder, and political repression throughout South America under the direction of dictators placed in power by the CIA.

Maybe then we can understand better the damage the US and other democratic countries left behind and why so many cross our border in search of safety and jobs.