One always wonders what goes on in Texas classrooms since the original reports of revisionist history curricula nearly ten years ago.
The latest example demonstrates some more subliminal methods still operative in lesson plans.
In an age of rebranding enslavement as ‘human trafficking’, Texas, the home of the most egregious revisionist history curricula, demonstrates its Trumpian ethos.
Because nothing says cultural hegemony like normalizing oppression. And nothing seems to ever change when in 2018 traitors continue to instiutionalize their lost causes.
(CNN)A Texas charter school is apologizing after a teacher gave an assignment to an eighth grade American History class, asking students to list the positive aspects of slavery,
"When I first read it, I thought, this was b.s.," said Great Hearts Monte Vista eighth-grade student Manu Livar.
Students in the class were supposed to complete an assignment on the "positive aspects" and "negative aspects" of the life of slaves, giving a "balanced view."
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When his mother picked Manu up, he showed her the assignment; she immediately sent a picture of it to her husband.
"What the hell is this revisionist history lesson trying to achieve here?!?" said Roberto Livar, Manu's father, who posted it to Facebook on Wednesday.
“This is what erasure looks like.” This is not an isolated oversight, but rather an intentional retelling of history.
Recent report claims State Board of Education members deliberately downplayed slavery, Civil Rights issues
A recent report by an education watchdog group claims that the current Texas history and social studies curriculum standards “distort instruction on slavery and the Civil War, civil rights, religion” and a host of other topics.
“The State Board of Education’s adoption in 2010 of new social studies curriculum standards, the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, or TEKS, was in many ways a triumph of ideology over facts,” is the opening line to the report, titled ‘Taking Politics Out of Classrooms: Recommendations for Revising the Texas Social Studies Curriculum Standards’, released by the left-leaning Texas Freedom Network Education Fund.
One of the primary criticisms made in the report is that Texas State Board of Education members “deliberately downplayed the central role of slavery in causing the Civil War.”
“In fact, one board member even argued that slavery had really been just an ‘after issue’ or ‘side issue’ of the war. So the history standards place slavery last – behind ‘sectionalism’ and ‘states’ rights’ – in the list of causes,” the report notes.
However, Texas shows us how pernicious their revisionism has become when RWNJs exclude certain key factors even important to ethno-nationalist ‘traditionalists’ like human freedom— as just one example.
For education, it means a lot more important ‘spaining is necessary for curricular integrity and quality.
Getting Whiggy History with it:
The historical struggle does need to be waged in regards to the discourse of revisionism. Because “fact-fetishism” does not absolve the analyst of reasoned interpretation on the path to explanation.
There have been some matters that have needed clarification, but the interest in eradicating slavery’s contribution to say, The Civil War are glaringly racist, yet ignorantly stubborn even in the 21st Century.
Stating that slavery was more efficient or doomed to inevitable failure will forever be problematic once one engages empirical and institutional antebellum US history.
Relative to the academic times, Fogel and Engerman weren’t equipped to handle the inevitable questions that a political economy approach would have addressed had they or the field been more receptive to adjusting their methodology. This was the age when US radical political economy was marginalized.
(Robert Fogel’s) Railways and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History (1964) both exemplified his own research style and led his whole subject of economic history in a new direction. He took an old question, that of the impact of the railways on the American economy, and approached it in a novel way, known as "counterfactual history". He outraged the traditionalists when he (hypothetically) built an entire network of canals and demonstrated that they could, for several decades, have transported America's freight almost as well as did the railways; the latter could not therefore, he concluded, be responsible for American prosperity. To reach this conclusion, he employed economic theory and statistics together with a close attention to historical sources, all hallmarks of what came to be called the "new economic history" or "cliometrics" - after Clio, the muse of history.
[...]
Many readers (of Time on the Cross (1974)) were outraged. The finding that slavery could be profitable seemed to suggest that it could be justified. Other orthodoxies were challenged by Fogel and Engerman, for example the view that slavery had conditioned the black population to laziness and lack of enterprise, an argument sometimes used to explain the poor economic performance of the South after the Civil War. Critics attacked on all fronts; woundingly for Fogel, some of them were fellow protagonists in the methodological battles that he had fought within economic history. He was even accused of racial prejudice; it was a ludicrous charge to level at a Jew married to a black woman. Bob, however, never shirked controversy. He later said that he dealt with critics of the new economic history like "Lenin confronting the Mensheviks." The analogy was well chosen, for much of Bob's early life was spent as a Communist youth organiser.
www.independent.co.uk/...
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) is a book by the economists Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. Asserting that slavery was an economically viable institution that had some benefits for African Americans, the book was reprinted in 1995 at its twentieth anniversary. First published a decade after the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the book contradicted contemporary assessments of the effects of slavery on African Americans in the American South before the Civil War. It attracted widespread attention in the media and generated heated controversy and criticism for its methodology and conclusions.
Fogel and Engerman asserted that slavery had a reciprocal economic benefit for slave owners and slaves. They wrote, "[S]lave owners expropriated far less than generally presumed, and over the course of a lifetime a slave field hand received approximately ninety percent of the income produced."(p. 5-6) They were estimating the value of housing, clothing, food and other benefits received by the slaves and argued that they lived as well in material terms as did free urban laborers; life was difficult for both classes.[3]
The authors acknowledged their thesis was controversial and emphasized that their goal was not to justify slavery. Rather, they asserted, their goal was to counter myths about the character of black Americans - myths they said had gained currency in the antebellum slavery debate and had survived into the civil rights era. These myths, the authors wrote, had their genesis in racist attitudes widely shared by both abolitionists and defenders of slavery. Myths included perceptions that black Americans were lazy, promiscuous, untrustworthy and lacked natural ability.
In American Slavery, the historian Peter Kolchin suggests that the economists did not fully consider the costs of the forced migration of more than one million slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South, where they were sold to cotton plantations.[5]:97 He wrote that the book was a "flash in the pan, a bold but now discredited work."[5]:492
Weiss believes that their role in writing the book was "more that of making such [quantitative] results more widely known among the general public and integrating that information into their bold, new vision of the way the slave system functioned."[3] Debate and controversy continue over the conclusions of Time on the Cross. The book's reissue in 1995 at its twentieth anniversary prompted new symposia and roundtables to discuss the material. New scholarly articles and books have been published that use similar methods to evaluate such factors as the physical stature of slaves (related to their health and material well-being) and their standard of living.[3]