California first state to require ethnic studies for high school graduation
latimes.com
latimes.com
They included Asians in that figure. I wonder how they will explain college admission here, "We can see that Asians were discriminated heavily against historically in USA, but things changed so now we too must discriminate against Asians or they will dominate our colleges!".
The discrimination in admissions is bad enough, but now they will force every Asian kid to sit and listen why it is good that the state discriminates against them even though history didn't favor them.
What gives you that idea? Also, isn't California the state where public universities aren't allowed to use affirmative action in admissions?
That's the magic of getting rid of scores based admission and replacing it with opaque "lotteries" or "holistic" admissions: You can't prove there's any discrimination because the process is completely opaque.
The only thing these policies will achieve, is to put the label of "potentially the bar was lowered for this person - risky hire" on someone if they aren't white or asian.
What is life like in Armenia, Israel, Africa, Punjab? Poorer, less free, less liberal (in the original sense of the word) than America.
This is not an education, its indoctrination.
It's worth noting that this isn't the only dysfunction that will likely lead to the "the strategic downfall of America (which can only come from within)." It's just another instance of the broader problem of a comfort with (and even preference for) disunity and the inability for factions to come together and compromise for the greater good. Another recent instance is the debt-limit brinkmanship. I think what underlies is it a lazy assumption that America's position is forever secure, so internecine ideological squabbles can take priority.
The term you are looking for is multiculturalism. It's a feature, believe it or not.
Would it not be more appropriate to incorporate this into history generally? I got the 90s revision curriculum here in Ontario, Canada and the indigenous peoples, waves of European conquerors, peasant refugees, and the modern immigration system, and just the origins of the peoples of this country was thematic from first grade. (And not all with rose-tinted glasses. Jewish refugees sent back to Europe. Cash payments for indigenous scalps. The "reasonable" compromise that ended slavery by slowly phasing it out. Mass detentions by race in WW II, among other things. Though any mainstream account ends up distorting and streamlining.)
There's an attempt at painting criminals of the American Revolutions as "refugees" when they fled north. Interesting the history courses are building up this narrative.
> Cash payments for indigenous scalps
What's often omitted from history books is that indigenous people fought a lot even before Europeans arrived.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalist_(American_Revolution)
I'm told that, well into the 20th century, the American Revolution was often taught in the British Empire as the War of American Rebellion. And it had its own mythology/didactic purpose.
First, a cautionary tale on what to do if you want to lose a colony. After all the Americans overreacted but they had a point.
It also served as an exhibit for the dangers of deviant American republicanism. Populists overthrowing constitutional government. Causing a nasty war. And for no reason. After all, in this historical mythology, the UK would have granted self rule to America as it soon did Canada. etc. if only the Americans had been reasonable. (And they weren't reasonable because they were republicans: see France.). It even served as proof that anti-imperial and republican sentiments held back human liberty and progress. (Slavery was banned in the British Empire long before the USA. Of course, the region with the plurality of slaves under British jurisdiction had just seceded...)
I almost wish it were still taught this way today, if only for the perspective shift.
That said, refugee isn't the wrong word to use for American loyalists who fled after the American revolution. Being a prominent loyalist made you persona non grata in the new United States of America. Forfeited property. A few were killed during and immediately after the war. Though most who stayed were absorbed soon enough and the whole ugly business forgotten about quite quickly.
It's more metaphysical than this even: "white" is without place/particularity in the world; why don't we call "white" people "European-Americans"?
Edit: This is even more clear when we observe what is happening when it gets asserted that a "black" man is "white"/acting "white": the implication is that he is, from a certain perspective, attempting/pretending to divest himself of emplacement/particularity/historicity; he cannot then in any appropriate manner return to being "black", a particular, emplaced, and historical body (his white friends will say "he's not really _that_ black"; his "blacker" kindred will say he's "white", a "coon", etc.)
This is why the rationalist subject of the Englightnment and all the philosophical notions that derive from that notion, while technically independent of any concrete demographic, are nevertheless seen as inextricable, concretely, from whiteness, and not only for the Black community.
A part of the liberation of the Enlightenment for a positive, inclusive socio-political project lies in "re-emplacing"/"re-embodying" those bodies we designate as "white" rather than presuming a monopoly on the subject of the Enlightenment by "white" bodies.
This intellectual operation should be seen as similiar to that carried out by Paul of Tarsus: the subject of Christianity does not yet adopt a universalist posture, concretely unfettered to physical properties of the body, until Paul defies the original apostles and asserts that circumsision is no longer the qualification for being a follower of Christ; that is, the embodiement of gentiles need not be altered so as to be like Hebrew bodies (like Christ's particular, Hebrew body).
Because black was considered denigrating/slur, and white isn’t.
The argument is that "White" is necessarily a denigrating term in its primary use of absolving European bodies of emplacement/embodiment/historicity over and against virtually everyone else on Earth. That "White" is a synonym for "European" is a more tenuous and fragile link than it may appear and much intellectual labor has gone into the maintenance of this link over time; hence why the apparatus of Race is so concerned with demonstrating that "race has always existed" and hence why "White" does not appear to be a denigrating term (to certain people). The history of Irish and Italians in America and their ultimate integration is another concrete demonstration of this negotiation.
For what it's worth a lot of curricula include a "world history" already, so I'm unsure what exactly they added.
[1]: https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...
It is notable that in a long multi-part document concerning racial justice, there is exactly zero mention of "Asian" but bountiful discussion on white nationalist ideology in math.
Would those be the needs of the Eloi? Math remains the underpinning of everything that enhances life in the modern world. Blissfully regarding it with disdain doesn't change that.
Define "modern needs." My understanding is that American math education has long been affected by a tug-of-war between...
1) people (usually focused on K-12 education) who want to dumb it down to meet the needs of "modern day to day life" (e.g. algebra isn't important because common people don't use it every day), and...
2) people (usually focused on post K-12 activities at elite levels), who want to make it rigorous, because strong math skills are fundamental for high-level achievement in engineering and science.
In America, #1 seems to be the dominant outlook unless there's some national competitive threat (e.g. the Soviets beating the US in the space race).
The document has only vauge allusions to specific problems that connect to racial bias. One they list is that the linearity of math education means that failing one course may prevent you from taking the next, even if the topics are not connected. Sure, this is probably true... but it's a problem for students of all races.
The document includes a note to highlight the stories of queer and non-white mathematicians. But, in my entire public school education, I don't recall a /single/ mention of any mathematician at all. Math was not "personified" in any way that I can remember.
Really, it's hard to even understand what the document is proposing, beyond that teachers should be aware that they might somehow be promoting white supremacy in their math class. ??
If that's white supremacy then I hope all the white supremacist bridges are clearly labeled so I can be sure to use them and not the ones that were designed with "ethnomathematics"
Seems fine to me. I always had trouble with word problems because the scenarios were, with rare exceptions, completely unrelatable.
>> "Though math teachers often tout the phrase “mistakes are expected, respected, inspected, and corrected,” their practices don’t always align. Teachers often treat mistakes as problems by equating them with wrongness, rather than treating them as opportunities for learning—which reinforces the ideas of perfectionism (that students shouldn’t make mistakes) and paternalism (teachers or other experts can and should correct mistakes)"
This seems like a reasonable recommendation! I was mocked and insulted by teachers for getting things wrong. It did not in any way encourage learning.
Can you give some examples? What wasn't relatable, and what would make them more relatable to you? The only "word problems" I really remember are the "bob has 10 apples and gives alice 4" type, because most math problems became "word problems" as the math got more complex.
This is false on many levels. Th concept of industrial-style tracked education is generally falling out of favor and being displaced by individualized curriculum adaptation with ad hoc, temporary, subject-specific shared learning groups of similar ability, and in math particularly there has been a recent and controversial change both implementing that change in methods and a change in focus for advanced learning toward deeper concept mastery rather than rushing through more concepts. Which certainly can be (and on HN has been, though people want to seem to rehash it in this thread with no new arguments) its own debate, but is not deleting material and then adding this.
The Equitable Math proposal is not this at all. All children are required to be on the same level.
It is exactly this minus ad hoc grouping, which is the least important and most subject-variable part. It explicitly and repeadtedly calls out the need for individualized opportunity, support, and expectations throughout, and explicitly cites as motivation concrete experience combining de-tracking with differentiated work and open-ended exploration improving performance outcomes for both more and less proficient students.
I don't know if people criticizing it aren't reading it, or if the parts that depart from the industrial-style one-size-fits-all in predefined groups model are so foreign to some people that they are literally incapable of incorporating them into their mental model of the framework despite them being explicit in the text.
The ability to jump forward into Calculus is about an individual child's capability to do Calculus. The ability to jump forward in math is the opposite of one size fits all.
It throws all the onus on teachers who have 20+ kids to teach to the basic state standards. They can't possibly develop and oversee individual sub-curricula for different levels in each subject. They do their best, but it's just not possible for them to dedicate more than a tiny fraction of their time to special instruction for advanced students.
My experience as a student under the former regine and parent of a very-high-proficiency student under the latter (because he is in a charter school that does this even though it isn't yet a state standard) is that the new model works quite a bit better.
This is also confirmed by the results of comparative before and after study of places that have switched from the old model to the new model, which is the motivation for making the new model a standard.
I'm not sure what you can learn from looking at charter schools, as long as they remain exceptional and outside the main system. There is a charter school in our district that effectively is a gifted school - it is explicitly a college prep school.
> The final version deletes the lessons and references that offended some Jewish groups.
Does anyone know what those lessons and references were? The article doesn't say.
Anywhere
But
California