Making Our Schools Safe for Propaganda
FEBRUARY 10, 2023
BY ROBERT KOEHLER
Curse that First Amendment! What were the Founding Fathers thinking?
As Ron DeSantis has declared and legislated, the safety of Florida — and, yeah, the safety of the nation — isn’t a matter of gun control (or police control) but speech control, especially in public-school classrooms and libraries, where the innocent minds of our children are developing.
We shouldn’t be teaching them the howling beast of so-called “real” history, for God’s sake, replete with words like “reparations” or “Dred Scott” or “mass incarceration” — let alone, “queer” — but rather, polite history. The America we believe in is the one where people behave themselves and everyone gets along, right? That’s the real America, and those who don’t acknowledge as much . . . well, we can always burn a cross on their lawn.
OK, calm down, class. Let me at least acknowledge this much: I can more or less understand the concern — the fear — on the DeSantis right of the teaching of real history: the divisive history of white conquest of a continent; the history of slavery, lynching, Native American genocide. Yeah, that could make some people feel uncomfortable, especially if history is taught primarily as propaganda, simplistic and unquestioned, an adjunct, say, to the Pledge of Allegiance, which is the history I grew up learning in the 1950s.
In those pre-civil-rights-era days — where white was still, unquestionably, right — history essentially was a matter of “the first white man” to do whatever, e.g.: sail across the Atlantic, “discover America,” conquer the Wild West, teach savages about God. History was a gallery of white male heroes. It was taught from war to war. And it was good.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/02/10/making-our-schools-safe-for-propaganda/
= new reply since forum marked as read
...he is just screaming "ya got trouble right here in River City".
