As an educational researcher and designer, this is what has driven me to focus on informal learning environments. Schools need so much change, but I just can’t deal with the red tape and bureaucracy and curriculum-by-committee crap. This shit happens in every state.

Jeremy: I’m not suggesting that modern equal rights movements don’t understand our government; I’m suggesting that the high school students who are getting these textbooks need to have it drilled into them. It’s one thing to tell them how a bill becomes law; it’s another to demonstrate how, over the course of our history, oppressed groups have convinced a majority of the politicians to vote in favor of equal rights. Was it just by increasing “political pressure”? (Do high school students really understand what that means?) Was it by threat of force?

I agree with Andrew that it’s necessary to teach the political context of the equal rights legislation. And mentioning what role the courts played in the movements is important, too.

Emphasizing that eventually a political majority passed a law isn’t the same as saying that the oppressed groups should feel grateful. It opens the door to analysing how legislation goes from unpopular to getting enough votes to become a law. It’s applying what students learn in civics to actual historical movements.

You rule. Based on these two sentences, you should be blogging.

True, democracy does try to avoid that, which is precisely why want you say isn’t entirely true. The American system, despite its many failings, is much better designed than that; for example, there’s a good reason that the Judicial branch of government is not elected by the majority. And sure enough, plenty of Supreme Court decisions in favor of minority rights have been unpopular in their time, or at least opposed strongly enough that elected legislators wouldn’t have risked their political capital on them.

Similarly, every advanced democracy has inbuilt checks against the tyranny of the majority, whether it be subsidies for smaller parties in European parliaments or skewed representation for lightly populated areas. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but an alarming number of people get through school without understanding any of this, and to teach the Civil Rights Act as some kind of popular and benevolent majority decision would negate the entire point of mentioning it at all. The importance of the bill as an example of how our democratic process works is impossible to teach without emphasizing both the extraordinary circumstances creating public pressure on Congress and the extraordinary resistance and subsequent compromises within legislature leading up to its passage.

Similarly, on the gay rights issue, I think it’s important to remember that most of the legislation concerning gay marriage has actually been created by opponents seeking to thwart every judicial move to recognize the Constitutional rights that we already have. Granting new liberties and ceasing to withhold basic human rights are not one and the same, and no one fighting for the latter should confuse it with the former.

How do we know what happened in 1682? Because events were documented by various people, who often have contradictory accounts, and interpreted through the filter of both their own beliefs and the limitations of their own information. The context of every fact is crucial to understanding its meaning, but there are an infinite variety of relevant background details that build up our understanding of the causes and effects of the hard-facts of history.

And that’s where both the education and the misinformation occurs. As the people in both videos exemplify, we can radically change the meaning of our narrative by editing facts, even when we don’t express an opinion in any way.

If you’ve ever been interviewed on the news, you understand exactly what I mean. You talk for a few minutes, maybe even say something quite complex or important, but in the end only a tiny bit gets quoted. It’s a fact that you said those words, but someone’s opinion determined which ones were important to fit the story they were constructing.

“Lies My Teacher Told Me,” mentioned by Becky below, is a great crash course in how history is better taught as a constantly involving controversy, rather than a series of facts, and it’s quite an entertaining book as well. Check it out if you haven’t read it!

Thank you for allowing me to legally count as 5/5 of a person and to have a vagina and a vote at the same time. If only white men had been around when my predecessors were denied those privileges in the first place, the world would be full of cotton candy clouds that rained gumdrops.