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emma wrote

mass shootings

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Angela wrote

Standardized tests are the worst creation.

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surreal wrote

religion/history lessons

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rot wrote

why history?

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OdiousOutlaw wrote

In my experience, a LOT of school history is propaganda and outright lies. Columbus "discovering" America and MLK's views stand out in my memory.

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rot wrote

incorrect/whitewashed history then

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OdiousOutlaw wrote

Exactly.

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celebratedrecluse wrote

The problem I see is that history is a tool of power. So whatever the context of the power relationships in an institution, the teaching of history will naturally mold itself to those power relationships in a distributed way.

I think that history should be taught, but maybe in a different format than school. Perhaps instead of reading textbooks assigned in a classroom by a centralized authority (teacher), an alternative might be to have students learn history in the context of theater, writing, or the creative arts in general. For example, late Howard Zinn worked on this with adaptations of the People's History of the United States for stage, for graphic novel, etc. Make the study so dynamic and interesting, and centering of subaltern voices, that it is difficult/impossible to render history taught in such a way through a fascist lens. This is what it means to me, to lesson-plan for unavoidable presence of fascism immanent in authoritarian structures.

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[deleted] wrote

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celebratedrecluse wrote

Sure, I think that's really cool!

However what I'm trying to say is that the methods by which history is taught actually reinforces these authoritarian tendencies within mainstream historical pedagogy. It's not that I think it's impossible to teach history from a radical perspective(s), within a traditional school setting. It's just that I think it's more difficult than it needs to be because of the structure it's emplaced in. I think people should continue trying to teach history within schools from a radical perspective, for sure, I just also think that radical historians would benefit from cooperating with, or at least coexisting with, unschooling/deschooling efforts like I was talking about.

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Catsforfun wrote

air conditioning

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rot wrote

youre trying to kill the kids?

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Catsforfun wrote

no, the AC is torture. Fuck AC

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rot wrote

what kinda ac is that? school would have been hell without heating/cooling

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Catsforfun wrote

the kind where its way too cold all the time. The kind where I put on a sweater to go inside the building.

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BrowseDuringClass1917 wrote

Lockers, they useless

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[deleted] wrote

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mofongo wrote

On gym days we have to wear our gym clothes all day long. There's no shower room either. Only now can I imagine how awful it must be go into a classroom with 50 sweaty teenagers.

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[deleted] wrote

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[deleted] wrote

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ploopt wrote

Weird - my school, also for security reasons, took the opposite approach. After Columbine happened, we were no longer allowed to carry bookbags. We had to scurry back and forth to our lockers all the time. They also put up a single camera at the main entrance. The security state slowly but inexorably establishes itself.

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