I Know Seattle is a Progressive City But Consider This

This blog tries to keep up with national trends, some of which are increasingly taking a hard right turn. There are a couple of reasons to keep up. 

One is that, as bad as it sounds, we could change presidents in Jan 2025. That would be disastrous for public education (and it doesn't matter which GOP person gets elected). 

Two, what is being put forward as "history" is more of saying "that was the norm back then" and/or "everybody did it" and/or "it wasn't that bad."  The new favorite is "well, these enslaved people got some skills and learned resiliency out of it." 

Your children will encounter kids who learned history in this manner in college. How colleges and universities are going to reconcile the differing thoughts about American history is unclear to me. 

Did you see Hamilton? I saw it twice when the Disney Plus channel had it on (I think it's still available). One of the beauties of Hamilton is that it presents our Founding Fathers as driven, passionate and brave men of action. It also shows them as ambitious, back-biting and flawed individuals. Both things can be true but either one alone would be false. We need to teach the full measure of history.

On Twitter yesterday, it was reported that the state of Florida is doing two things. One is completely jaw-dropping in its audacity and the other is just dumb. 

The first is that Florida has approved using some videos as resources from Prager U (which is NOT a university but part of a media company). From Time:

The company is best known for its 5-10-minute videos on news, history, and civics topics. In the coming school year, Florida grade school students could be assigned PragerU Kids videos to watch in class or for homework, perhaps alongside longtime classroom aids like Scholastic and Highlights magazines. 

PragerU is going through the process of becoming an approved educational resource in other states, but would not reveal which ones. 

The goal of PragerU and its kids division is to provide an alternative to what it sees as a leftwing perspective trending in American public schools and media in recent years, its CEO tells TIME. “America's education system has been hijacked by one side,” says Marissa Streit, PragerU CEO.  

One side says children are being indoctrinated by progressive teachers making them feel bad about their race, privilege, and gender; the other argues the right is trying to further marginalize marginalized groups and stifle legitimate academic inquiries.

And here's the thing. Are Prager U's videos balanced? Well, they are if you like whataboutism. Talking about both sides but firmly discarding one is not balance. And a hearty helping of Christianity sprinkled in there is also not balance (nor should it be legal in public education).

 Exhibit A is what was on Twitter - two kids talking to Christopher Columbus (who seems pretty okay with two little kids just appearing out of nowhere on his ship). 

Christopher Columbus explains to the kids that "being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?" "Slavery is as old as time and taken place in every corner of the world." "What did the culture and society at the time treat as no big deal?"

That's just in this clip. Go listen to the entire 13 minutes and you will learn:

-That the first people he encountered were peaceful and curious and helpful but the others were "not civilized" and "far from peaceful." 

- Judging people in the past "by your own standards es stupido."

- That he really liked the Greeks and their contributions but alas, he didn't like that they had multiple gods and "alternative lifestyles" unlike good Christians. 

Plus, Columbus has bright blue eyes and in the video says, "caramba" three times. He was Italian and in no painting of the time did he have blue eyes. Caramba is a Spanish word.

On the upside, they do admit the world is round.

The second thing that Florida is doing is not allowing full texts of Shakespeare's plays to be taught over "sex content." 

From Newsweek:

Students in Hillsborough County will still learn passages from Shakespeare's classics, such as Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, but if they wish to read the full text they will have to do it out of school hours.

"Many of these decisions are causing a tremendous amount of anxiety and concern," she said. "HCPS is extremely committed to honoring state guidance and the law, as well as protecting our employees.

School districts are spending thousands of dollars to have people pour over texts being used and cataloguing them to meet those new state laws. Now if you were a teacher who could be prosecuted for improperly teaching a text, wouldn't you feel worried and stifled?

Joseph Cool, a reading teacher at Gaither High School, said the decision came at a price.

He told the Tampa Bay Times: "There's some raunchiness in Shakespeare because that's what sold tickets in his time. I think the rest of the nation - no the world, is laughing at us.

"Taking Shakespeare in its entirety out because the relationship between Romeo and Juliet is somehow exploiting minors is just absurd."

To be fair, this is not the first time for Shakespeare's texts to raise eyebrows:

King's College London's professor of Shakespeare studies, Dr. Sonia Massai, told Newsweek that censorship and redactions of parts of Shakespeare's work are not new and have occurred over several centuries, including in a 1640 edition of his poems that swapped pronouns in the love text Sonnets from male to female, conforming to heterosexual norms of the time.

Massai said: "I can understand that extracts and shortened texts can be more practical for younger children but from high school it is important to read the text and to do so slowly and chronologically as they [the plays] are carefully constructed and reading only in part can distort your perception of the text, and prompt a different interpretation than if you read it in full."