Saturday, June 26, 2010

Facts Are For Losers

Here were have an op/ed piece discussing re-versioning historical accounts to suit current social / political stances. It sounds kind of dirty to say it, but if you keep in mind that whatever version you have -- any version at all -- was written to suit a specific social / political stance, it's less dodgy and more like plain old disappointing. Perhaps what I found most interesting about this short article is that the author effectively compares the current educational agendas in Russia and Texas. Someone should probably feel at least a little bit weird about that.

1 comment:

Rufus said...

Hey, we just got back from cottage country, so I'll write more after I've slept. I did write a long response to the Texas textbook controversy and shelved it as too cynical. But the gist was that I feel like we've already got a problem when we're talking about the uses of history, as opposed to history being worthwhile in itself. So I despise rewriting it, of course, but we're already partway there in most schools since we teach only the history that will be most useful, as we see it.