Montgomery County Public Schools’ World Studies Mythology

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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Comfort Food, Common Core, Common Core State Standards, Crock, Curriculum 2.0, Curriculum Development, Eurocentric Perspective, Eurocentrism, Falsehoods, Latin America, Maryland, MCPS, Middle Ages, Middle School, Montgomery County Public Schools, Multicultural Education, Multiculturalism, Mythology, Teaching and Learning, Technocrats, Western Civilization, Western Dominance, World History, World Studies

Satirical cartoon of Rudyard Kipling’s The White (?) Man’s Burden (“white” colonial powers being carried as the burden of their “colored” subjects), Life Magazine, March 16, 1899. (Travb via Wikipedia). In public domain.

My son is taking Advanced World Studies in seventh grade this year. As a historian — and one that’s taught World History fifteen times over the years — I thought it was a good thing that he would have exposure to world history and cultures before engaging in US history in eighth grade and in high school. Once again, the technocrats in K-12 education have proven me dead wrong. While there may be some exposure to the rest of the world, the frame for the curriculum is one that not-so-subtly implies that world studies, advanced or otherwise, cannot exist without a European or Western frame to tell students how to think about the non-Western part of the globe.

I noticed it the first week, but didn’t pay much attention to the brief synopsis (what teachers call their “syllabus”) of the course until Back to School Night last week. The four units for my son’s course are

Unit One: The Foundation of Modern Political Systems: Europe in the Middle Ages
Unit Two: The Influence of Culture in Africa: The Middle Ages and Today
Unit Three: Geography Shapes Latin America
Unit Four: The Impact of Economics: One World Past and Present

When I finally read through it, I was incensed. It sunk in with my experiences with AP World History and with World History at the college level why so many of my own students were almost completely ignorant of world history that wasn’t about ancient Greece, the Roman Empire, or Western Europe. School districts, even ones as above par as MCPS, have helped lull students into a false sense of security through the exchange of knowledge as comfort food, rather than a higher protein diet of actual history.

Unit One is fine, for the most part, although the idea of a nation-state or some sort of constitutional democracy doesn’t entirely come from Europe. But it’s downhill from there. Culture, Africa and the Middle Ages for Africa? Really? The Middle Ages is a specifically Western and Central European experience, as no civilization from the classical world experienced a greater decline or collapse than Rome in the fifth century CE. To just take that term and paste it unto another continent, another group of people, and their different history is just plain wrong. How about Culture and Africa, 1000-1500 CE? You don’t need the frame of Europe’s Middle Ages to discuss Africa, unless your point is to embed some sense of Western dominance as a subliminal theme within the curriculum.

Or unless the curriculum developers in Rockville were thinking about making the Age of European Discovery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Africa’s “Middle Ages.” The period between 1450 and 1800, in which the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish, the English, and the French helped stoke the fires of intertribal and cross-kingdom warfare to obtain millions of slaves for their colonies in the Western Hemisphere. That’s probably too much for the advanced twelve-year-old, though, no?

Storming of the Teocalli by Hernán Cortez and His Troops (1848), painting by Emanuel Leutze, January 11, 2012. (Penelope37 via Wikipedia). In public domain.

Unit Three and the term “Latin America?” Seriously? It covers the Maya, the Mexica (or rather, Aztecs), and the Inca, all prior to European contact in the sixteenth century. So technically, there’s no Latin in the Americas before 1500. MCPS, ever heard of the Americas, the Western Hemisphere, Mesoamerica, and Andean civilizations, all terms that are more accurate alternatives to Latin America in the time before Columbus and conquistadors? Unless, again, the point of curriculum designers here was to bake into the recipe for this course a sense of inevitability. That is, that the pre-Columbian cultures of the Western Hemisphere, no matter how sophisticated, were doomed to fall by the wayside in the wake of Western dominance over the globe.

Unit Four and “One World Past and Present” in the context of trade, economic systems, and communication bring the themes of European dominance together in the period since 1450. The MCPS curriculum designers do hint that “the cultural diffusion between many ‘worlds’ had both positive and negative consequences.” But for the most part, the technocrats provide a sense of progress to market-based economies and positive globalization in this unit, as Europeans led the charge to make the world one and whole.

Stainless steel Crock-Pot, September 29, 2015. (http://amazon.com).

This is a crock of a curriculum, MCPS, a shameful attempt at world studies. The course might as well be called, Advanced and Expanded Western Civilization, How Europeans Went From the Middle Ages to Dominating the World. The point of any world history or world studies course is supposed to be the study of specific bits of history of the world, without imposing a Western model, frame, or sense of progress and comparison on the rest of the world in the process. Otherwise, what’s the point? You might as well teach Western Civ in middle school, then, and save world history to teachers and curriculum designers who understand that the world is a bigger place than Western-culture-navel-gazing.

Though the pressures of Common Core may have birthed this new curriculum as part of MCPS’s Curriculum 2.0 efforts, it’s not specifically a Common Core-inspired curriculum. One of the problems with Common Core State Standards and PARCC assessments is that they mask the problems that existed in America’s K-12 education long before. One of which is fake efforts at diversity and a multicultural curriculum, of which MCPS’s World Studies is but one example. It may well be true that virtually all world history curriculum is bs, however. But that is an article for another day.

Fake History, Historians’ Fakery

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, culture, Eclectic, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race

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A&E, Academic Historians, Academicians, American Heroes Channel, David Mallott, Discovery Communications, Documentaries, Eurocentric Perspective, Fake History, Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, H2, Historical Documentaries, History, History as Entertainment, Insomnia, Kenneth Branagh, Military History, Peter Coyote, Sleep Aids, Sleeping Pills, Thomas R. Martin, Thomas S. Burns, TV Series, TV Shows

Fake History Channel Twitter account, June 2012. (@NotHistory1).

For many of you, this will sound like a “been-there, done-that” kind of a post, but I’m posting anyway. It’s fairly evident Discovery Communications and A&E’s collection of history-related channels are meant for an older crowd of mostly White males with a hankering for military history, for big wars and powerful European (and occasionally Asian/Middle Eastern) men in history. H-History, H2 (soon to be Vice Channel), American Heroes Channel, and Military History are basically a collection of old and new-yet-rehashed documentaries on history that middle-aged and elderly White men can keep up with without ever feeling challenged by facts or different views on such facts. Especially when it comes to anything beyond the actual battlefields of World War II.

Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, regular snake-oil salesman on H2, History regarding Ancient Aliens, June 6, 2015. (tumblr.com).

I can only criticize the TV networks and their owners but so much, though. The fact is, the only reason I watch these channels is to fall asleep faster, after a long day, getting my hyper eleven-year-old son to bed, and after some prayer or finishing up some work. Because History and H2 now dip their toes into reality TV and dramatic TV series with Pawn Stars, Ancient Aliens, Vikings, and Texas Rising, I can’t use these useless shows to cure insomnia. In the past year, American Heroes Channel’s gotten into the act, with How We Got Here and America’s Most Badass, a regular portrayal of great White men (and occasionally, women) and their self-made, rugged individualism building a modern America with their bare hands and teeth.

The result is that I can’t fall asleep to these channels anymore. But for the past seven months, I’ve discovered a treasure chest of older or fairly recent documentaries on either Netflix or YouTube to watch, or rather, to watch me as I fall asleep. I listen for soothing narrators, like actors Peter Coyote, Avery Brooks, Keith David or Martin Sheen, or at least, British voices like Robert Powell or Kenneth Branagh.

I look for histories that I know all too well, boring enough to fall asleep to, but not so boring that it leaves me thinking about how poorly the producers did in putting together their documentary. So World War II in Colour, World War I in Colour, Barbarians, Barbarians II, Ancients Behaving Badly, Rome: Power and Glory, Engineering An Empire, Rome: Rise and Fall of an Empire, The Story of India, Islam: Empire of Faith, and The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance have been my go-to sleeping pills since last Thanksgiving (I also fall asleep to Wild China, Lions in Battle, Aerial America, The Universe, How The Universe Works, Cosmos, the BBC Planet Earth series, and other, less problematic shows and documentaries). Other documentaries, like We Shall Remain (on the plight of Native Americans since 1607) or The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, would cause too much pain, anger or interest, blowing an opportunity for six-and-a-half hours of sleep or more for that night.

Thomas R. Martin, Jeremiah O’Connor Professor in Classics at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, MA, June 6, 2015. (http://www.historyseries.net).

So I tend to tolerate — but definitely do not accept — the ideas that the creators of these documentaries push. Like Rome being “the greatest empire the world has ever known” (the Mongols, the Hellenistic Greeks, the Arabs of the Dar al-Islam days, T’ang Dynasty China, Achaemenid Persia, even the British would all beg to differ) or Archimedes as the “greatest genius of the ancient world” (Imhotep’s probably saying, “Really now?!?”). That’s bullshit, of course, typical White and European navel-gazing. This is exactly why there’s no need for a White History Month or a college major in White Male Studies. As I often have that thought, I usually fall asleep, secure in the fact that this mythology would never make it into any class I teach.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed that some of the so-called academic historians that help move the story along in some of these documentaries. Some, like Thomas S. Burns (Emory University), Thomas R. Martin (College of the Holy Cross), and Robocop (1988) actor/historian Peter Weller (Syracuse University), all tell the story of ancient Rome’s rise and fall, or the medieval spread of smallpox and bubonic plague as if they actually lived through it. The assumptions they make about the people of 1,500 or 2,000 years ago are just staggering. It’s as if Rome and Western Europe had a monopoly on civilization, and that when Rome fell, a black cloud full of lightning bolts descended on the subcontinent like Hell itself, drowning it in invasion and sickness for half a millennium. Except that Spain (especially under the Moors), parts of Italy, southern France and Byzantine Europe weren’t exactly crying for a return to the glory days of 20,000 rich Roman families and 16 million slaves.

Krispy Kreme Hot Dogs at minor-league Wilmington (DE) Blue Rocks (consisting of glazed raspberry jelly donut, with hot dog, bacon and onions in between), April 16, 2015. (http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/18/living/gallery/hybrid-food-mashups/).

Others, like David B. Mallott, associate professor and associate dean at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, have applied modern-day thinking of social science — in his case, psychiatry — to their alleged analysis in these overly scripted documentaries. Describing someone like Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great as “bloodthirsty” isn’t exactly in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, is it, Dr. Mallott? And, given the historical context — a time without the UN Declaration of Human Rights or the Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians or prisoners of war — would borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia with violent paranoid delusions really apply to Julius Caesar or Napoleon Bonaparte? Ugh!

If you’re going to entertain me, Discovery Communications or A&E, can you please do it without using the pretense of academic expertise as support for your grandiose mythologizing of historical events and the powerful Eurasian men involved? At least when the BBC and PBS do documentaries, they don’t just turn it over to geeks in the fifties and sixties to act out their preteen imaginations of what Rome must’ve been like two millennia ago. How can I continue to fall asleep to your shows and documentaries if you continue to exaggerate and lie and have academically trained hacks-for-historians and social scientists do the same, all in the name of entertainment?