South Dakota no longer requires kids to learn about the Constitution, Native Americans, or slavery

[gollygee]

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/south-dakota-no-longer-requires-kids-to-learn-about-the-constitution-native-americans-or-slavery/

History is more than memorization. It teaches students that current events are contingent on the events that came before them. History teaches us the root causes of the things that happen in our world today.

When students learn about context, contingency, and causation they develop a deeper—more robust—understanding of the world around them.

The study of the American past relieves us of our narcissism and helps us to see ourselves as part of a much larger human story. As the Stanford historian Sam Wineburg writes, “mature historical understanding teaching us … to go beyond our brief life, and to go beyond the fleeting moment in human history to which we have been born.” Don’t we want our young people—our future citizens—to understand their world in this way?

[PatrickforO]

1. Sounds like Tea Party types

have infiltrated local politics in SD pretty heavily.

Boy are these idiots being obedient shills for the Koch brothers and other oligarchs. Because the last thing the oligarchs want is people who know about our history and about the constitution. They just want ignorant, docile workers just smart enough to operate the cash register.

[Ichigo Kurosaki]

4. I disagree

The TP loves to wave the Constitution and the Founding Fathers as part of their ideology.
I find it hard to believe they would remove such history lessons from school.

[haele]

6. They will use the David Barton texts, where the Constitution was based on "Bibblickkle principles".

Founding Fathers were all hard-core evangelical warriors and "Muscular Christians". The Native Americans and Africans were better off subservient to the kindly plantation owners and settlers that brought the American Way to them than they were out in the wilderness before the European influence. 3/5ths citizenship if any at all was the optimal state for them, until they whole-heartedly embraced Western European Values - and lightened their skin enough to pass.
Oh, and that so-called "Enlightenment" crap that was peddled by those whimpy poets and nerds who obviously wasted too much time wandering around and "thinking"? - totally rejected by those strong, virile founding fathers who listened to their gut instincts and got it done!

Oh, did I forget the tag?

Haele

[PatrickforO]

8. All these people actually do is give a copy of the Constitution a ride in their breast pockets.

They don't actually know what it says, or even care about it. We've had TP types take over our school boards in some areas in my state, and they don't want any teaching about any 'controversy.' They want to de-emphasize the civil rights and women's movements, downplay the labor movement, downplay slavery and generally present an 'American exceptionalism' view of history. They don't want civics, and they want to pollute the science our kids learn with creationist religious dogma. Generally, from what I've seen is the TP types have no clue how to run anything. They don't know how an economy works, and they have real cognitive problems with understanding cause and effect: at the local level, what this looks like is they think they can cut taxes to the bone and then are surprised when revenue goes down (not like Reagan and his Chicago school 'intellectuals' said it should) and they have to cut services. They want to bust unions and are dead set against any policy that helps anyone. Because, you see, they feel that wanting to use tax money to help people instead of businesses is an extreme liberal position.

Basically, at a time when businesses are crying out for a bigger supply of well-trained, intelligent people who can think critically and solve problems, the TP-influenced K-12 schools are turning out kids who have no clue how to do any of that or even be citizens in a republic. These jokers are so ignorant that they have been fooled by the oligarchs, dirt bags like the Koch brothers, into believing we should deregulate everything, privatize most government functions and gut any social programs or safety nets.

Back to 'pure' capitalism so we can all live under the 'benign' invisible hand of the so-called 'free market.' If you want to find out what kind of a living hell pure capitalism is for 99% of the population, read Jack London's 'People of the Abyss.'

[Octafish]

2. Understanding history is double-plus bad.

Nolledge of stuff makes it harder to foist crap like Trickle Down Economics on people for 34 years.

[Javaman]

3. making sure the future is dumb and republican. nt

[niyad]

5. "those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it"

[KamaAina]

7. Wounded Knee is in South Dakota.

But these poor kids won't even know that.