Category Archives: Social Studies

History Under Construction in Florida

In the July 2 New York Times, Mary Beth Norton, a history professor at Cornell, points out the Florida legislature recent assertion that the U.S. history taught in the state’s schools “shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed” and “shall be viewed as knowable, teachable and testable” is not only a gross misunderstanding of the nature of history, but part of “a growing tendency in the United States to substitute easily grasped absolutes for messy and ambiguous realities.”

(Norton points to the quest of certain judges to capture the “original intent” of constitutional clauses as another example of this tendency.)

Norton rightly notes that “a stress on facts, not constructions, superficially appears to be ideologically neutral. Yet the choice of which facts to stress, and which to omit, is crucial. In the end, history can never be ‘

She also analyzes why Flordia legislators decided to emphasize the role of Declaration of Independence in the social studies curriculum rather that of the US Constitution:

“In short, a class learning about the drafting of the Constitution would confront the unpleasant reality of founding fathers who either owned slaves themselves or protected the right of others to own them. How much simpler and less troubling to present young people with a rosy picture based on modern understandings of the language of the Declaration of Independence! Under the guise of returning to a factual teaching of history in the state’s schools, Florida’s legislators have mandated an ahistorical construction that paradoxically distorts the very facts they purport to revere.”
July 2, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
History Under Construction in Florida

By MARY BETH NORTON
West Tisbury, Mass.

AS a historian, I love facts. I especially love facts about early America, the subject I have researched, taught and written about for more than 40 years. The Florida Legislature would seem to share my enthusiasm. An education law it recently enacted insists, “American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed” and “shall be viewed as knowable, teachable and testable.” The statute places particular importance on the facts of the Declaration of Independence, which was adopted by the Second Continental Congress two days after its vote for independence on July 2, 1776 — 230 years ago today.

Yet the wording of the law befuddles me. Facts mean little or nothing without being interpreted — another word for “constructed.” All historians know that facts never speak for themselves.

Take an example from my own experience. Several years ago I was delighted to uncover proof in the British Public Record Office that an accused male “witch” in 1692 Salem, Mass., had been trading with enemy French and Indians, just as a young accuser had charged. That document confirmed my developing conviction that the Salem witch trials were linked to New England’s hostile relationships with the French and Indians. But to many other scholars who previously had encountered that document, it meant no such thing.

The Florida law, while claiming to eschew constructed interpretations, is itself an obvious construction. The statute specifically defines what the term “American history” includes: “the period of discovery, early colonies, the War for Independence, the Civil War, the expansion of the United States to its present boundaries, the world wars, and the civil rights movement to the present.”

Among the multitude of omissions from that list is any discussion of the religious development of the country or the transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy. The statute thus constructs an American past that values certain aspects — especially wars and the civil rights movement — more than others.

Nowhere is this construction more obvious than in the law’s emphasis on the Declaration of Independence as a key founding document. “The history of the United States,” it asserts, “shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” Elsewhere, it lists those principles: “national sovereignty, natural law, self-evident truth, equality of all persons, limited government, popular sovereignty and inalienable rights of life, liberty and property.”

Reading that made me wonder if Florida’s legislators had familiarized themselves with the Declaration and the context of its adoption. Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase, after all, was “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” — not property.

The Declaration ended, rather than created, a government. It forcefully asserted the right of the people to alter or abolish a polity unresponsive to their needs, a “universal principle” overlooked by Florida’s legislators. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 — who drafted the document on which the nation is actually based — rarely mentioned the Declaration in debate. Indeed, as Pauline Maier, a historian, has pointed out, we owe the current interpretation of the Declaration to 19th-century commentators, especially Abraham Lincoln.

What, then, is to be made of the stress on the Declaration in the new Florida law? An earlier version of the law had emphasized study of the Constitution and the Declaration equally, describing each in general terms. In the new version, only the description of the Constitution retains its non-prescriptive character. The Constitution, after all, is an inconvenient vehicle for setting forth universal principles; it concerned itself with nitty-gritty details about federalism, separation of powers and the like. Further, the Constitution supported the continuation of slavery, thereby undermining the notion that the nation from its earliest days adhered to Florida’s list of universal principles, prominently including “equality of all persons.”

In short, a class learning about the drafting of the Constitution would confront the unpleasant reality of founding fathers who either owned slaves themselves or protected the right of others to own them. How much simpler and less troubling to present young people with a rosy picture based on modern understandings of the language of the Declaration of Independence! Under the guise of returning to a factual teaching of history in the state’s schools, Florida’s legislators have mandated an ahistorical construction that paradoxically distorts the very facts they purport to revere.

The Florida law highlights a growing tendency in the United States to substitute easily grasped absolutes for messy and ambiguous realities. (Another example of the same type of thinking is the quest of certain judges to capture the “original intent” of constitutional clauses.) A stress on facts, not constructions, superficially appears to be ideologically neutral. Yet the choice of which facts to stress, and which to omit, is crucial. In the end, history can never be “factual …not constructed,” as the language of the Florida statute itself demonstrates.

Mary Beth Norton, a professor of American history at Cornell, is the author of “In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

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Carolina Residents Confused, Terrified As Victorious Hurricane Players Riot In Streets

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From The Onion: Carolina Residents Confused, Terrified As Victorious Hurricane Players Riot In Streets

RALEIGH, NC—Only hours after the Carolina Hurricanes won the NHL Championship Monday night in a hard-fought Game 7 against the Edmonton Oilers, North Carolina Gov. Michael Easley mobilized the National Guard to contain over two dozen members of what he described as “some sort of depraved, violent, heretofore unheard-of gang calling themselves the Hurricanes.” …

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A test on every desk and flag on every wall

… That seems to be the plan for education reform in the US these days.

Flag.gifThe Arizona legislature has passed a bill that will require a 2 X 3 foot, made-in-America US flag in every public education classroom (preschool through university) in the state.

As the bill moved through the legislature amendments were added that also require legible copies of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Very patriotic on the part of Arizona legislators, don’t you think?

But the bill is an unfunded mandate. No money would be provided under the legislation and colleges are instructed to raise private funds to pay for the flags.

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Robert Fisk: Has racism invaded Canada? The Case of the Toronto 17

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent. His new book is The Conquest of the Middle East.

June 12, 2006

The Case of the Toronto 17: Has Racism Invaded Canada?

By ROBERT FISK

This has been a good week to be in Canada–or an awful week, depending on your point of view–to understand just how irretrievably biased and potentially racist the Canadian press has become. For, after the arrest of 17 Canadian Muslims on “terrorism” charges, the Toronto Globe and Mail and, to a slightly lesser extent, the National Post, have indulged in an orgy of finger-pointing that must reduce the chances of any fair trial and, at the same time, sow fear in the hearts of the country’s more than 700,000 Muslims. In fact, if I were a Canadian Muslim right now, I’d already be checking the airline timetables for a flight out of town. Or is that the purpose of this press campaign?

First, the charges. Even a lawyer for one of the accused has talked of a plot to storm the Parliament in Ottawa, hold MPs hostage and chop off the head of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Without challenging the “facts” or casting any doubt on their sources–primarily the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or Canada’s leak-dripping Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) — reporters have told their readers that the 17 were variously planning to blow up Parliament, CSIS’s headquarters, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and sundry other targets. Every veiled and chadored Muslim woman relative of the accused has been photographed and their pictures printed, often on front pages. “Home-grown terrorists” has become theme of the month–even though the “terrorists” have yet to stand trial.

They were in receipt of “fertilizers”, we were told, which could be turned into explosives. When it emerged that Canadian police officers had already switched the “fertilizers” for a less harmful substance, nobody followed up the implications of this apparent “sting”. A Buffalo radio station down in the US even announced that the accused had actually received “explosives”. Bingo: Guilty before trial.

Of course, the Muslim-bashers have laced this nonsense with the usual pious concern for the rights of the accused. “Before I go on, one disclaimer,” purred the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente. “Nothing has been proved and nobody should rush to judgment.” Which, needless to say, Wente then went on to do in the same paragraph. “The exposure of our very own home-grown terrorists, if that’s what the men aspired to be, was both predictably shocking and shockingly predictable.” And just in case we missed the point of this hypocrisy, Wente ended her column by announcing that “Canada is not exempt from home-grown terrorism”. Angry young men are the tinderbox and Islamism is the match.
The country will probably have better luck than most at “putting out the fire”, she adds. But who, I wonder, is really lighting the match? For a very unpleasant–albeit initially innocuous–phrase has now found its way into the papers. The accused 17–and, indeed their families and sometimes the country’s entire Muslim community–are now referred to as “Canadian-born”. Well, yes, they are Canadian-born. But there’s a subtle difference between this and being described as a “Canadian”–as other citizens of this vast country are in every other context. And the implications are obvious; there are now two types of Canadian citizen: The Canadian-born variety (Muslims) and Canadians (the rest).

If this seems finicky, try the following sentence from the Globe and Mail’s front page on Tuesday, supposedly an eyewitness account of the police arrest operation: “Parked directly outside his … office was a large, gray, cube-shaped truck and, on the ground nearby, he recognized one of the two brown-skinned young men who had taken possession of the next door rented unit…” Come again? Brown-skinned? What in God’s name is this outrageous piece of racism doing on the front page of a major Canadian daily? What is “brown-skinned” supposed to mean–if it is not just a revolting attempt to isolate Muslims as the “other” in Canada’s highly multicultural society? I notice, for example, that when the paper obsequiously refers to Toronto’s police chief and his reportedly brilliant cops, he is not referred to as “white-skinned” (which he most assuredly is). Amid this swamp, Canada’s journalists are managing to soften the realities of their country’s new military involvement in Afghanistan.

More than 2,000 troops are deployed around Kandahar in active military operations against Taleban insurgents. They are taking the place of US troops, who will be transferred to fight even more Muslims insurgents in Iraq.

Canada is thus now involved in the Afghan war–those who doubt this should note the country has already shelled out $1.8bn in “defense spending” in Afghanistan and only $500m in “additional expenditures”, including humanitarian assistance and democratic renewal (sic)–and, by extension, in Iraq. In other words, Canada has gone to war in the Middle East.

None of this, according to the Canadian foreign minister, could be the cause of Muslim anger at home, although Jack Hooper–the CSIS chief who has a lot to learn about the Middle East but talks far too much–said a few days ago that “we had a high threat profile (in Canada) before Afghanistan. In any event, the presence of Canadians and Canadian forces there has elevated that threat somewhat.” I read all this on a flight from Calgary to Ottawa this week, sitting just a row behind Tim Goddard, his wife Sally and daughter Victoria, who were chatting gently and smiling bravely to the crew and fellow passengers. In the cargo hold of our aircraft lay the coffin of Goddard’s other daughter, Nichola, the first Canadian woman soldier to be killed in action in Afghanistan.

The next day, he scattered sand on Nichola’s coffin at Canada’s national military cemetery. A heartrending photograph of him appeared in the Post–but buried away on Page 6. And on the front page? A picture of British policemen standing outside the Bradford home of a Muslim “who may have links to Canada”.

Allegedly, of course.

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The Independent asks “Does Marx Still Matter?”

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The Independent (London, UK) June 6 2006

Politics and principles: Marx: does he still matter?

In a letter to former Labour leader Michael Foot, written in 1982 and published yesterday, Tony Blair reveals that reading Karl Marx ‘irreversibly altered’ his outlook. He even agreed with Tony Benn that Labour’s right-wing was politically bankrupt. We asked nine commentators – including Mr Benn – whether Marxism still has anything to offer today
Published: 16 June 2006

Eric Hobsbawm Historian

I think there has been a substantial revival of interest in Marx in recent years, and this has been largely because what he said about the volatility and shape of capitalism was correct – even some business people now seem to recognise this. Marx is once again somebody that you can quote, and this in part is due to the end of the Cold War.

In terms of Marx’s legacy, as the Chinese are reported to have said following the French Revolution: “It’s too early to tell.” What we do know, though, is that Marx and his disciples were massively responsible for the shaping of the 20th century, for good or for bad, and Marx was an extraordinarily important thinker.

In this era of neo-liberal globalisation, Marxist thinking is still important in showing that while capitalism is enormously dynamic, that dynamism creates crises. We need to address these crises, not by free markets, but by controlling the system or changing it altogether. Whether or not that is possible in the short term is a different story.

Matthew d’Ancona Editor, ‘THE Spectator’

Marx is certainly relevant. As Francis Wheen’s very good biography shows, he was on to the idea of globalisation long before right-wing economists started writing about it. Beyond that, his way of thinking is still pervasive.

One of the fascinating things about the Labour Party is that there has been what you might call a Marx-size hole in it, a quest for a sense of destiny. Blair has tried to fill that: his critics would say with religion, his apologists would say with Europe. Blair is someone with a pretty strong sense of destiny, and he has tried to extend that to the Labour Party. He is no Marxist but in a funny way he has that sense of destiny Marx had.

Marx was wrong about lots of things, but he is still somebody you have to know about. He is one of a very small number of people – Marx, Freud and Darwin are, I suppose, the three big ones – who completely changed the way we see mankind.

Jack Straw Leader of The House of Commons

Karl Marx’s legacy – not just for the Labour Party but for intellectual development – is his development of Hegel’s more scientific approach to historical analysis and his elevation of the dialectical process. Both are, I think, enduring. Much of his analysis is accurate and his analytical tools are still respected by many historians.

His prescriptions were often widely off-beam, as we now know, and played down non-economic forces to a point where I think he made some grievous historical and political errors – for example, ignoring the role of nationalism and religion as political forces.

What we saw in 1989, with the collapse of theSoviet system, was that the Marxist-Leninist approach to running not only economies but also societies was unenduring. The point of Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History was not that history had ended but that we had reached a point of ideological hegemony which I think we probably had. So Marxist Leninism is not relevant in that respect but the analysis is still worth having.

Hilary Wainwright Editor, ‘Red Pepper’

For all the abuses of his work, Marx’s view of society was far from being mechanical and determinist. His notion of people “making history but not in conditions of their own choosing” and his idea of “the social individual” points to that crucial balance between recognising the capacity of individuals to choose to transform rather than reproduce the social relations that depend on them and on the other hand the enduring nature of these social relations.

There is in Marx a powerfully grounded belief in human creativity combined with a strong belief in individual fufilment. It’s there in his theory of alienation: the way in which the capitalist labour market depends on workers’ alienation from their creative capacity. It’s there in his vision of socialism: not as a command economy but as the association of free producers. It is a cruel irony his name should have been used to justify authoritarianism and new, state, forms of alienation.

Tony Benn Labour Politician

It’s the teachers, including the prophets of ancient times, the founders of the great religions, along with Galileo, Darwin, and Karl Marx, who explain the world and our place in it.

I always think of Marx as the last of the Old Testament prophets who wrote a brilliant book about capitalism but also condemned it because of the oppression by one class of rich and powerful people.

Marx was no more responsible for a Stalinist tyranny than Jesus was for the Inquisition or the recent war of aggression waged by a Christian president and a Christian prime minister. Without the Marxist analysis, it is impossible to understand capitalism and globalisation, to reach a moral judgement, and it is even harder to explain the crude use of that power and the need for it to be held to account. There is nothing in the Marxist analysis to prevent us from thinking things out for ourselves and working to build a genuine democracy, where the polling station replaces the marketplace, and the ballot replaces the wallet as a source of political and economic power.

Alexei Sayle Comedian and Writer

I think that the Marxist historical analysis is an accurate account of how society has developed. Although perhaps a little wide of the mark, it is definitely still relevant. When Marx spoke about the differences in society being based on economic structure he definitely had a point.

Marxism should be seen as a tool and therefore a method of analysing society and that can be relevant today. You can certainly be right-wing and still be a Marxist.

It is a historical analysis of the class struggles and a prediction of the way our society would be, and it isn’t wrong. Yes, it is a complex set of ideas, but it makes sense.

Norman Tebbit Former Conservative Party Chairman

I read bits of Marx, though in a way when I grew up what seemed more relevant was Mein Kampf. I read that because I wanted to know about the bugger who was dropping bombs on me. I don’t think Marx is relevant, except to show up the folly of people who believe in what is now shown to be an absolute failure of a political system. Blair is right that it purports to be a total system. You can be a Conservative without being a capitalist, you can be Labour without being a socialist, but if you buy Marx, you have to buy the lot. It’s like a religion in that respect, and very harmful. So, for once, Tony’s right.

Anthony Seldon Headmaster, Wellington College

I think that Marx’s way of analysing society is of course relevant today because you simply cannot understand how societies have formed today without seeing the remnants of Marxism. It has been hugely influential across the world.

Marx definitely got some things wrong because his theory was, sadly, overly idealistic about working-class unity. Nevertheless, you can certainly still see elements of truth in what he said – workers are stronger when they stand together.

Marxism hasn’t itself been a negative influence. It is often the way that followers have chosen to interpret Marxism that has led to things like police states and concentration camps. Marx would have been horrified in the same way that Jesus would have been by the way people have interpreted him.

I find Marxism a lot less odious as an idea than capitalist policies. The idea of people living in a just society with no warfare is an inspiring vision, although hopelessly naïve.

Bob Crow General Secretary, RMT

It was entertaining to hear that Tony Blair’s youthful outlook was “irreversibly altered” by reading Marx. Of course, he doesn’t say in which direction his outlook was altered, but his actions during the past decade give us a clue. Today it is far easier to win the ear of Downing Street if you represent the class of capitalists, as Marx would have put it, rather than working people.

Of course, it may be that Blair has had a memory lapse and just needs a refresher. No need to wade through all of Das Kapital – just a quick read of the little pamphlet Wages, Price and Profit, which lays bare the mechanism by which bosses extract surplus value from the labour of working people. It should be in the pocket of every trade unionist.

In it, Marx demolishes the idea that wage rises cause inflation and that it is futile for workers to fight for higher pay.

Marx’s great achievement was understanding capitalism, and in understanding it he came to the conclusion that it could and must be replaced with something better.

As long as there are capitalists Marx will remain relevant.

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Michigan superintendent pulls social studies curriculum

Following a rant by the The Detroit News about the “bias” of the new social studies curriculum in Michigan, the state superintendent of education pulled the plug on it, citing ommissions of 9/11 and Watergate.

The Detroit News reports that Superintendent Michael P. Flanagan said there was a “biased flavor” in some of the curriculum examples proposed in the document, adding that he could see how it might look like an “indoctrination piece.”

Revised documents will likely not be submitted to the state board in time for fall, said Martin Ackley, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Education.

Perhaps the revised document will follow SC’s lead and allow for off-campus Bible education.

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New South Carolina law allows credit for off-campus Bible education

FSMbkgrd1_th1.jpgSouth Carolina has become the second state to allow public school credit for off-campus Bible education.

The South Carolina Released Time Credit Act, signed into law June 2 by Gov. Mark Sanford, permits schools to give students an elective credit for participating in the religion class. According to The State newspaper, students can take part in the Released Time programs because of a 1952 court ruling, saying it is constitutional for students to leave campus to take part in religious education courses.

Okay, what we need is a couple of folks in the Palmetto State who can put together an off-campus course on Flying Spaghetti Monsterism. Anybody out there?

I wonder if the law allows for online learning (from, say, an internet cafe)?

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Over 100 students protest arrests for skipping school to participate in immigration reform protests

More than 100 students have been criminally charged for skipping school to attend immigration “reform” protests. While many protesters faced repercussions for participating in the massive protests across the US, no group was criminally charged on the scale of students in Round Rock, Texas (a mostly White and conservative suburb of Austin).

The Christian Science Monitor reports that “Across the country, educators punished protesters with detention, suspension, and even canceled their extracurricular activities. But some school districts got the police involved.”

So what’s the lesson that’s learned with truancy trumps free-speech rights? Well…could it be that the democracy that is taught in US high schools is not in fact the democracy that is actually practiced there.

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Christian Science Monitor: For students, cost of protest can be high

By Kris Axtman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

HOUSTON

Jennifer Avilez says her parents, both from Mexico, worked hard their whole lives to get her into a good school. So when she walked out of that school in late March to protest an immigration bill passed by the House, she did it for all those who hadn’t achieved as much.

“Other people need to have the same chance as they did,” she says. “This country was started by immigrants, after all.”

But her protest came to a halt when she was arrested and accused of criminal behavior by the local police.

The case against Jennifer, a student who takes AP courses at Stony Point High School in Round Rock, Texas, is one of hundreds like it that pit students’ free-speech rights against local rules against truancy.

Other immigration protesters have faced repercussions, too. Many employers took a hard line by firing those who didn’t show up for work. And during the rallies, which took place in dozens of cities nationwide this spring, some people were ticketed by police for minor infractions such as loitering or hindering traffic.

But no group was criminally charged on such a large scale as the students in Round Rock, a conservative, mostly white suburb near Austin, the state capital. The number of Hispanics there has only recently begun to increase.

“What was being done by those students is in the highest traditions of this country and we would hope that their idealism would be weighed against the rules that they’ve broken,” says Josh Bernstein, a senior policy analyst at the National Immigration Law Center, a Washington organization that promotes immigrant rights.

Across the country, educators punished protesters with detention, suspension, and even canceled their extracurricular activities. But some school districts got the police involved.

On the first day that Round Rock students protested, police officers gave warnings, which Jennifer says she never heard. The next day, March 31, police rounded up more than 200 students who were heading to a rally in Austin. Officers issued tickets for violating daytime curfew, a Class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $500.

What makes this case unique is that the city has an ordinance that allows for free speech and assembly – which trumps the curfew-violation statute, says Ernest Saadiq Morris, a staff attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project in Austin.

But violators must show beyond a reasonable doubt that they were actually exercising that right, “and not just running roughshod through the city,” writes Eric Poteet, with the Round Rock Police Department, in an e-mail interview.

He says that only a certain percentage of marchers were actually protesting immigration reform. “The rest were just skipping school.”

In addition, says Officer Poteet, the student protests required the presence of police officers who were needed elsewhere, affecting the department’s ability to serve the community.

To date, more than 100 of the Round Rock students have pleaded guilty or did not contest the charges and will either pay a fine or do community service.

The other 98 have requested trials; the Texas Civil Rights Project is defending 82 of those.

The trials will take place from June through November. The first five have already been dismissed. Jennifer’s trial is set for July 7.

“Schools could have disciplined students in far more appropriate ways than criminalizing them,” says Morris.

But students didn’t need to skip school – or break any laws – to send a strong message, says Flavia Jimenez, an immigration policy analyst with the National Council of La Raza in Washington, a Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization.

“We feel that children in this country did a very courageous thing by speaking up about ways the illegal-immigration issue has affected them, but we were not in any way encouraging them to walk out of their classes,” says Ms. Jimenez. “Education is extremely important to the Latino community and will do more for us in the long run.”

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