Monday, September 6, 2010
First Blog
This week in class we participated in a discussion using the Socratic Circle. The discussion was centered around the new educational curriculum that Texas State Officials have adopted for their schools featuring a one-sided representation of history backed by the conservative Republican Party. Such an influence on children in schools has been argued to be unconstitutional, as if only teaching one side of history could potentially mold the general societies opinion to a more conservative view, threatening the beliefs and voices of future liberals. During our class’s time in the Socratic Circle environment, we discussed different ways to create a history curriculum that is completely objective and filled with the right kind of information for a student to know to be able to think critically about this country and its past. I believe that our best solution to this problem was to put into the history book only the situations and circumstances that happened in the past. Also, to have a panel of people, all of different beliefs and ideas, and have each person contribute to every section of history involved in the book. Finally, I would allow individual teachers to teach whatever they felt necessary. This might not seem like a great idea to some because it gives the teacher too much freedom to impart whatever their beliefs are on innocent students; however, throughout the course of schooling, a student has as many as 12 different teachers, out of these 12 there are bound to be a good amount of different ideas that the student will be enlightened to, allowing the student to make up their own opinions to carry with them throughout life. As for a history curriculum, or any subject curriculum in general being fair, I don’t believe it is possible to be completely fair or objective. Through the teaching of students, teachers will unconsciously impart their beliefs no matter what they are told. They may not do it intentionally, but it will happen; it may be through the way they act, or the way the talk, or even the way they treat others. There is no controlling the inclusion of opinion into the teaching of students, that is why I believe that the beast bet is to regulate the amount of time a teacher gets to spend teaching. If 12 different teachers are allowed 1 full year to teach what they feel is needed to be taught, then enough opinion will be introduced into the system to allow the student to form opinions of their own. I feel that the state government should just allow the teachers to teach, and keep their hands out of our schools.
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I think that if we make history books completely objective then it will only add to how boring and monotonous they are already. We need to have opinion in history books. Students need to know that the holocaust was bad. They need to know that we should not repeat the immoral things that have gone on in the past such as murders, the holocaust, and slavery. Also not all teachers care so much about politics or the students. Some teachers just give the students homework assignments and don't take the trouble to put their opinion into the subject. Lastly if we leave it up to the teachers to insert their beliefs into history, then we are destroying the whole purpose of having objective history books. They are going to insert the opinion they learned from the history books they read when they were kids. So we might as well not make all history books non bias. It is inevitable that their will be bias in everything, which isn't really a bad thing.
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