Presumably on the grounds that the state may as well be hung for a goat as for a sheep, the state of Arizona has passed a law prohibiting ethnic studies courses in its public schools:
PHOENIX – Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill targeting a school district’s ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.
State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district’s Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.
Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.
“It’s just like the old South, and it’s long past time that we prohibited it,” Horne said.
Brewer’s signature on the bill Tuesday comes less than a month after she signed the nation’s toughest crackdown on illegal immigration — a move that ignited international backlash amid charges the measure would encourage racial profiling of Hispanics. The governor has said profiling will not be tolerated.
I’m of mixed mind on this. It certainly isn’t particularly good PR for Arizona but, as I say, the state is already in bad odor. Knowledge is good and can anything that gets high school kids interested in learning be bad?
On the other hand it isn’t unheard of for ethnic studies classes to be consciousness-raising activities and focused more on promoting activism than on serious academic work. Are Arizona high schools so far ahead of the curve on core curriculum (readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic) that the limited time that’s available can be devoted to ethnic studies courses?
To be honest I’d be 100% 4-square in favor of ethnic studies courses in high school if Mexican-American students were barred from Chicano studies courses, African American students were barred from African American studies courses, and American Indian students were barred from Native American studies courses. I don’t think that’s usually the way it works out.
I have the same mixed feelings.
I’m getting more and more concerned about the way society as a whole, parents, teachers, politicians and so on are piling on kids in middle school and high school. I’m on book tour right now and doing school visits. Part of my presentation deals with the fact that I work a 4 hour day and the average middle school kid works 10.
This entire country needs to get off kids’ backs. If it isn’t some Leftie with an agenda it’s a Rightie with an agenda. Then there are the teacher’s unions, the various theorist meddlers, and perhaps most damaging of all, credential-obsessed parents who sell their kids out for an illusory and overrated shot at Stanford or Yale.
I don’t know why we need Mexican-American studies. But I also don’t know why we need homework, required charitable work, bullshit history courses, brain-dead “chunk” writing, sports, pointless time-wasting projects designed for nothing but fundraising, or Christianist-tainted biology. I don’t think schools have caught up to the 20th century yet, let alone the 21st and the last thing they need is a bunch of state legislature yahoos meddling any further.
If the AZ legislature wanted to do something useful for kids they could pass a child’s Bill of Rights starting with this: each child 17 and younger has a right to 9 hours of sleep, regular meal times, five hours a day of free time and weekends off. Whatever time is left can be filled by the competing agendas of clueless adults, but let’s start by getting off the kids’ backs.
This topic came up with friends visiting from L.A. around Christmastime. I was surprised how angry they were at the public schools in their area for teaching their kids how bad whites are. (My friends are originally from Illinois and Pennsylvania) Pretty liberal people, but they are trying to move to a different district and they complained that housing prices still are too high in neighborhoods with sane public schools.
I’d offered, as I still believe, that U.S. history classes should be different in different parts of the county, but I was told that all kids were taught was the type of history intended to make hispanics feel better about themselves so that they can score higher on the tests.
No. Last I checked we were ranked in the high 40s out of all the states for test scores. (We are also ranked about that in funding per student.)
From the link: “Six UN human rights experts released a statement earlier Tuesday saying all people have the right to learn about their own cultural and linguistic heritage, they said.”
Now I want to know who I can sue. My children have not been taught about their Manx-American heritage, nor does the school district appear inclined to do so. Can I send the principal to the Hague?
I wonder how Anglo parents would feel about dropping ethnic studies but teaching the Texas War of Independence, the Mexican-American War, the Philippine imperial adventure and the Spanish-American War in a historically-accurate way.
michael, my kids are in grade school, so I have much to learn, but the way things are going I would be surprised if their school teaches them about any of those wars by the time they graduate from high school. Through 3rd grade, it’s been wall to wall reading, writing, rithmitic and occasional journeys into the civil rights struggle and computers.
That’s one of the things I would prefer.
Another thing – and better – would be to eliminate “ethnic studies” and instead turn them into history classes. So rather than offer “Mexican-American Studies” (which, by the way, is one of those “money drain” majors in college when you take it that give you little useful skills upon getting the degree), the schools could instead offer a course on “Latin American history”, to go with “European History” *, and possibly other areas as well. It would also avoid the whole Latino = Mexican trap.
* My school, for example, had “European history” as an AP course.
PD and Brett:
What’s so strange to me is that you hardly need a specific ethnically-oriented course to convince anyone that the US has been fairly awful to Mexico and hispanics in general. The history will do that. Of course at the same time I’d want to see a balanced view of Mexico’s own problems and bad behavior. History generally does away with such clear categories as victim and evildoer. (Not always, but often.)
Brett: My high school, one of the larger in Illinois btw, refused to offer AP courses because they didn’t like the idea of dividing the school into groups. This whole idea of ethnic studies associated with one group is utterly alien to me, but I’m getting older.
It has to do with the bizarre trend in favor of giving every minority group their special group privileges, like special classes and the like, instead of actually doing a more comprehensive overall history that incorporates the roles such groups played in US history. *
*I remember raising that point with my European History teacher once, when I noticed that every major section had a “Women in the XX time period” part. I asked, “Why do they segregate them like that, instead of just writing women into the general history? Isn’t that like them tacitly saying that women didn’t have important roles in that period, and thus we have to specifically make sure they’re noticed?”
“Texas War of Independence, the Mexican-American War, the Philippine imperial adventure and the Spanish-American War in a historically-accurate way.”
My son is a junior in high school. They went over those last year in a fairly accurate way, or so I thought. We talk/argue lots of history at our dinner table, so I keep up on what he is learning. What seems almost universally true in our area, is that local schools avoid teaching recent American history. They avoid anything after WWII. ( I would add in a short bit on Latin American and our involvement. maybe a few Chesty Puller quotes for effect.)
Steve
” I would add in a short bit on Latin American and our involvement. maybe a few Chesty Puller quotes for effect.”
I think you mean Smedely Butler, who was really outspoken re our involvement in Banana Wars. Chesty won two of his five (that’s right, five) Navy Crosses in Central America. I’m not aware that he ever expressed any opinions along the lines of Butler.
Steve, they don’t get past WWII because the classes waste too much time on small wars and small presidents and people of little importance in the grand scheme of things. I’ve read that in that some of the public schools in the Deep South the section on the War Between the States was scheduled for the end of the term, so that when they didn’t get to it, the next term could start out with carpetbaggers and scalawags.
If I were history class czar, I’d probably have two sections. The first on the American Revolution and the second on the Civil War. They would be fat sections including events before and after that relate to the subject, such as the Civil Rights Movement. Maybe one might want to include the Mexican War in the context of prelude to the Civil War, but I frankly don’t think it’s that important.
Oops, thanks sam. That was who I meant.
PD- That makes some sense, though most of his other classes finish their material. I think that some teachers just want to avoid the controversies of teaching about more recent wars, sort of like the example you give about the Civil War. How could you leave out Jackson? His influence is important.
Steve
It’s not entirely out of lack of affection that I would skip over Jackson, but I think our history text books are slaves to chronology and would benefit from more depth on fewer topics. I’m not sure I agree that Jackson’s influence remained important after the Civil War; his political ideology regarding national banks, internal improvements, tariffs, state’s rights and slavery were largely abandoned. And the party he founded doesn’t resemble his anymore.
Hi Dave and everyone who’s posted a comment,
I work for a global radio discussion programme called World Have Your Say (www.worldhaveyoursay.com) and we’re talking about this today. If you’d like to take part – contact me on claudia.bradshaw@bbc.co.uk and I’ll explain more.