Lisa’s (Online) Teaching Blog

I am still thinking about the Texas State Board of Education decision to rewrite the history textbooks for their schools. The idea is apparently to emphasize white Christianity (including creationism) as a guiding force of the nation. At the time, a lot of people asked me what I thought because I’m a historian. History has always been used to further the ends of politics, and what was interesting to me was that people were actually talking about the issue and being concerned. Debate and inquiry (or even better, the other way around) was happening. I liked that.

Then I began thinking about what effect that sort of right-field history book will have on children, and I’ve decided it won’t have much, because in my experience college students do not remember any of the history they learned in the lower grades anyway.

Thus it can be a good thing that students don’t listen in school. The battle over textbooks may seem to be a war for the minds of children, but children see textbook content as crap to be put on a test. If, however, the educational reformers have their way and the teaching of material becomes more active and collaborative, two things may happen:

1. the active, collaborative, discovery method will make it impossible to ignore alternatives to the textbook’s viewpoint (thank goodness for the internet), or

2. the active method will be resisted by conservatives, and thus children will zone out and not learn the crap.

So a textbook like the one they plan in Texas might not work the way they think it will. This may be the best argument for retaining instructivist pedagogy, rote memorization, and boring educational methods I’ve ever considered.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at 8:26 pm and is filed under Musings, Pedagogy, edfuture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.