bobover3 (imported) wrote: Mon Feb 27, 2012 5:30 am The average person knows little history of any kind. There's no special ignorance of non-American or non-European history. Most people know little beyond what they've personally experienced plus a garbled version of the fictions they've seen on TV or the movies. It's easy to create "history" by placing a fiction in a TV show or movie. Then most people will say they know it. I've met few Americans with any knowledge of American history beyond a few popular myths, and fewer still who know anything at all about contemporary Europe, let alone European history.
The idea that there's a selective ignorance of the history of "people of color," and also women, flies in the face of US academic history for the past 40 years. There are few colleges today, at least among those considered prestigious, that do not have large departments studying all the supposedly suppressed histories, languages, and cultures. Departments of Black and Women's Studies are both mandatory. Literature about Asia, Africa, Latin America, et al., is required for most freshmen. In fact, many high schools now include this material in their curricula, not wanting to be left behind when it comes to academic fashion and political indoctrination. (These curricula are predictably anti-American and anti-white, by implication, if not openly.)
Yet we continue to be told about the poor "marginalized" peoples of the world. Examine the course catalog of any major university today, and you'll find more classes and more faculty concerned with these subjects in total than with American and European history. Majoring in Chinese is "cool" today. Majoring in French is not. Ask any students you know at a major university.
So why do we still hear about the supposed invisibility of non-white people? Because it serves the ends of those whose profession is non-white cultures - it guarantees jobs, grants, publications, etc.
Now let me ask: go to China or Japan or anywhere in Latin America or Africa and tell me if the people there scorn their own histories and languages as we do ours. Do they scant their own histories as we do, or is it considered an obvious necessity for people to be well versed in their own culture, supplemented with knowledge of others? I understand that all Chinese students are taught English. Does this mean they don't spend more time with Chinese language, history, and culture?
Every nation has a history whose passage from one generation to the next is essential to the very survival of that nation as a nation. Every nation determined to endure is careful to teach its children what it means to belong to that nation.
Perhaps it's no surprise that the anti-American left is determined to minimize the teaching of American history. When I went to school I studied US history every year from 1st grade through high school. The need was considered obvious. Today, I understand that "world history," in which US history plays but a small part often supplants US history entirely. Again, let me ask about the curricula in other countries. Do they not consider it essential to pass on their own history?
But Slammr is right that US history is a tapestry woven of many separate peoples, all of whom became American despite where they came from. The history of all these peoples needs to be told in the context of the history of which it was a part. Atomizing and Balkanizing the US may be an objective of the left (divide and conquer), but we should pay it no mind. Rather, we should strive to undo the harm that has already been done to generations of America's young in the name of long-outdated agendas from the 1960s.
Bob,
Just out of curiosity? Is there any minority group that you are a member of, that has been marginalized by society? In the sense that people have widespread misinformation about you and it makes them dislike you without knowing you? And I am not being sarcastic or trying to bait you. I am really interested in knowing if you know what it feels like to have the "majority" take away your human dignity simply because they are the majority. I come from a world that tells me that the majority is not right, by virtue of being the majority, and in fact are often times wrong, as history has shown us. I feel that as long as bigotry against Black Americans is alive and well, which it is, then it's justified to bring attention to the history of Black people. It's only by exposing the humanity of others does equality truly happen. Having said that, I think we should have a "(fill in the blank) ___________ history month" for all American cultures who feel the hand of bigotry. Here on the west coast I see a lot of bigotry towards people of Asian descent. We need to teach those histories and those cultures also. But the biggest slight of all is that no one really spends much time on the Native Americans, except as to detail their genocide. History before Europeans is practically ignored. You would think that American History would begin before Europeans got here. But it doesn't. Instead it moves to how the Europeans discovered America, as if it didn't exist until then. It's a really skewed point of view. Just like calling it "the new world". It was not new at all and neither were the people who inhabited it. Not only that, but the 12,000 year written history of the Aztecs was destroyed by Cortez because it was "blasphemous". It contradicted the Bible.
Elizabeth
A petulant demiurge has enslaved my spirit in physical form.
