Somewhere, the ghost of our 15th president, James 'Old Buck' Buchanan is smiling.
Public schools in California will be required to teach students about the contributions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans starting Jan. 1 after Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday signed a controversial bill to add the topic to the social sciences curriculum.
Textbooks now must include information on the role of LGBT Americans, as well as Americans with disabilities, though California's budget crisis has delayed the purchasing of new books until at least 2015.
"History should be honest," Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement. "This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books."
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/...
As a gay man, I'm actually a little uncomfortable with this. When I was in college, I volunteered to be a helper in a class with a bunch of special needs students and became quite friendly with the teacher. She was quite liberal and very involved in the local Democratic party, which at that time was still mostly in charge of the state of FL. I had some conversations with her as to what she felt the failings of the school system in the state were. By far, she said, her biggest objection was to politicians passing laws about what must and must not be taught. By example, she mentioned how you would have one politician decide that Holocaust history should be taught and so he passes a bill and then another wants civil rights history and then another wants an emphasis on women's rights and all of a sudden you get all of these mandates and you no longer have the flexibility to that a good teacher needs.
I'm being a bit tongue in cheek about James Buchanan, but I pointed him out for a reason. For the vast majority of US history, any gay person in a prominent position to affect history was going to be closeted. I do not know for sure if Buchanan was gay - nor Walt Whitman - so where are they going to find gay people to teach about? Does history start with Harvey Milk? And is it worth giving someone who only held a relatively minor political position more than a paragraph in a history book, even though he was a trailblazer? It's even worse with transgendered people - where are they going to find someone who was transgendered who made a mark in history (unless you believe the rumors about J. Edgar Hoover).
I understand the intentions behind this law and they are good ones. The desire to give GLBT youth someone to look up to and want to be like is understandable, but I just don't think a government fiat is the way to go about it. I'd be curious to know what the teachers here think about this subject.