That said I care very little about the social aspects of education unless they are taking away from math, science and making kids who are competent at independent thinking and problem solving.
I would wager most Americans would not even be aware of that distinction. In popular discussion, they're the same thing.
So if school kids are being taught "the WW2 era American internment camps should be called American concentration camps," they're actually being mislead. The lesson can't be oblivious to popular understandings or less precise popular usage.
It's also worth noting that strategic obliviousness to the difference between popular and technical definitions is a time-tested and effective way to lie and mislead, because it lends itself to a fallacious but effective motte and bailey defense, which also exploits embarrassment over not wanting to seem ignorant and prejudice against people who appear ignorant to silence challenges.
Your response should have been: "calling them internment camps is as misleading as equating them to Nazi 'Concentration camps'". But you didn't want to use the word concentration because you knew it would make your argument look silly.
No, because people know what the term "internment camps" means in this context.
At least in the American colloquial context, "concentration camps" and "internment camps" are more names for specific historical instances not types.
I disagree, because the topic is very intentionally glossed over. Most people couldn't tell you what internment means and will not associate it with anything bad.
Internment is for foreign nationals. The implication is there is a loyalty conflict (foreign citizenship) that requires them to be controlled. Concentration camps is the correct term.
If people are trying to gatekeep the term "concentration camp," a term that existed before WW2, they should stop.
>The lesson can't be oblivious to popular understandings or less precise popular usage.
No sane person equates the Japanese-American experience with the Holocaust so I'm not sure exactly who you think is actually trying to "lie and mislead." For decades, the vast majority of the community (led by the JACL) preferred to say nothing about it in the interest of integration.
The renaming is about stopping the use of anodyne terms ("relocation center" and "internment camp") that literally did, and do, nothing but make a few people feel better about the armed imprisonment of US citizens. Roosevelt, Truman, and several of their secretaries called them "concentration camps."
US most definitely doesn't deserve to be lauded for internment camps or the reasons why US entered WW2.
What are you talking about?
Even worse (though not intentional), this minimizes what the Nazis did. Let's hope no one comes out of that class with the idea that Hitler was no worse than FDR.