Ahhh, education.
One of my classes this semester is an Intro to Education class, because one of the things I'd like to do with my life is go to Japan and teach English, but I've never taught anything before, and I don't want to be one of those teachers who hates teaching, so I thought I would take this class and see how it feels.
I've been slightly side-tracked by being pissed off at my textbook.
This often happens to me -- learning astronomy pisses me off about about current "debates" on what we know (no, a scientific theory is not just some idea about how something might work, easily disproven -- the word means something different in this context!); learning philosophy pisses me off about constitutional arguments (not actually founded on Christian principles -- founded on the philosophical principles of Utilitarianism, especially as expressed by John Stuart Mill); learning psychology makes a lot of horror movies hard to watch; and learning history has made almost every textbook ever unbearable.
(Common sense doesn't help on this level, either.)
Some examples:
Kepler's Laws? Are not actually Kepler's. He translated the work of an Islamic scholar into German, as the original foreword of his book clearly spells out, only performing the most cursory double-check by performing the experiments in the original text again himself. This foreword was removed from later editions, in -- I kid you not -- what was essentially an enormous conspiracy on the part of later white Europeans to rationalize their dominance over other races.
The Dark Ages? Are largely a myth. Yes, Western Europe became a den of ignorance, the Roman Catholic Church morphed into a many-armed force for essentially evil, etc. But Western Europe was the only part of the world to suffer in this fashion. At the same time as we were wondering why dumping feces out your window and onto the streets below might possibly be harmful, Eastern Europe was having a Golden Age of enlightenment and discovery. I'm not joking when I say that something like 90% of the "discoveries" made by Westerners during the Renaissance were, like "Kepler's" Laws, merely translations of things that Eastern Europe had already figured out. The Reformation of the Catholic Church? Largely involved it becoming a twin of the thriving Eastern Orthodox Church.
And it's not like Eastern Europe didn't try to help us stay current, either. One of the first principles of Islam is knowledge, and its followers believed that part of their religious duty was to learn as much as they could about the natural world and pass that knowledge on. They worked hard to translate their scientific and medical writings into Latin, for easy consumption by us. We then treated this offered knowledge as a TRAP, their medical texts as poison, their books on aerodynamics as lies -- all with the apparent assumption that no Islamic person would ever tell a Christian anything that wasn't designed to trick them into killing themselves.
For this reason, nothing discovered by Islamic scholars came into use in Europe until after it had been translated by a Westerner (and so published under a friendlier-looking name).
And yes, this is why the Renaissance was such an explosion: because all we had to do was take our heads out of our asses, and knowledge was right there for the taking.
Anyway, I'm reading my textbook, and after talking to me in earnest tones for chapters about racism (and other isms), how the white race in America is completely unaware of and needs to be made aware of the injustices still faced by other races, how the privileged class must be taught to recognize that privilege -- after acknowledging that we are considered historically illiterate -- is now more or less holding my hand and reassuring me that efforts to educate African Americans were "greatly enhanced by sympathetic and humanitarian white friends".
There's a reason why white people don't consider themselves a race. It starts with the fact that black is so often capitalized, and continues into the part where we're rarely even specified as American, let alone European American. We're encouraged to think of ourselves not as a race, but as a color, and not even a real color, but white: all the colors in the frickin' rainbow. I don't know about you guys, but I'm not white -- I'm a sort of pale peach color.
But this kind of dreck doesn't help. I've read less than two pages of narrow paragraphs and large print talking about the early struggle to obtain any form of education for black (brown?) folk. None of it has really acknowledged the enemy being fought. There has been no effort whatsoever to make me feel guilty for the actions of my race -- nothing to even suggest these noble soldiers were fighting against us, rather than green space aliens bent on educating only rich white males. Even the passage that states early Christians worked hard to get around "an unwritten law that a Christian should not be a slave" -- in other words, to convert and moderately educate their slaves without feeling morally-obligated to free them -- is written in such a way that makes it sound as though the reader should go "Whoo hoo! Go you, Baptists, for first deciding to let them learn to read and thus leading to modern educational efforts!"
Stop teaching white children that only their efforts have ever given other people access to dignity and equality, and stop acting like our one moment in a thousand of actually behaving like decent human beings is worthy of Mother Theresa-level praise.
In short: I'm being reassured that white people are good and helpful before I've even had to deal with the idea that we might not have been. (I'm serious when I say that we might as well have banded together against those green aliens, there's nothing in here about our thinking they were inferior.)
This is only outclassed by the chapter's initial statement that our historical illiteracy should be fixed by learning more about the Founding Fathers and our great nation. The textbook author clearly hasn't put this much thought into it, but maybe that historical illiteracy accusation is more about the fact that you just spent two paragraphs summarizing early Chinese education as being only about religion, conformity, and obedience, and then two pages talking in glowing terms about the Greeks (who were actually educated in Egypt, thanks for your one sentence about that in your one paragraph about Egypt) and the Romans that followed them.
No, historical literacy does not "inevitably" lead to "the truest form of patriotism". Historical literacy would probably involve learning that we aren't, you know, the one tiny bright light in a dark, empty world of other, alien cultures that don't value democracy or individualism. :(
ARGH. sfd';sfa' Stupid, stupid textbooks.
I've been slightly side-tracked by being pissed off at my textbook.
This often happens to me -- learning astronomy pisses me off about about current "debates" on what we know (no, a scientific theory is not just some idea about how something might work, easily disproven -- the word means something different in this context!); learning philosophy pisses me off about constitutional arguments (not actually founded on Christian principles -- founded on the philosophical principles of Utilitarianism, especially as expressed by John Stuart Mill); learning psychology makes a lot of horror movies hard to watch; and learning history has made almost every textbook ever unbearable.
(Common sense doesn't help on this level, either.)
Some examples:
Kepler's Laws? Are not actually Kepler's. He translated the work of an Islamic scholar into German, as the original foreword of his book clearly spells out, only performing the most cursory double-check by performing the experiments in the original text again himself. This foreword was removed from later editions, in -- I kid you not -- what was essentially an enormous conspiracy on the part of later white Europeans to rationalize their dominance over other races.
The Dark Ages? Are largely a myth. Yes, Western Europe became a den of ignorance, the Roman Catholic Church morphed into a many-armed force for essentially evil, etc. But Western Europe was the only part of the world to suffer in this fashion. At the same time as we were wondering why dumping feces out your window and onto the streets below might possibly be harmful, Eastern Europe was having a Golden Age of enlightenment and discovery. I'm not joking when I say that something like 90% of the "discoveries" made by Westerners during the Renaissance were, like "Kepler's" Laws, merely translations of things that Eastern Europe had already figured out. The Reformation of the Catholic Church? Largely involved it becoming a twin of the thriving Eastern Orthodox Church.
And it's not like Eastern Europe didn't try to help us stay current, either. One of the first principles of Islam is knowledge, and its followers believed that part of their religious duty was to learn as much as they could about the natural world and pass that knowledge on. They worked hard to translate their scientific and medical writings into Latin, for easy consumption by us. We then treated this offered knowledge as a TRAP, their medical texts as poison, their books on aerodynamics as lies -- all with the apparent assumption that no Islamic person would ever tell a Christian anything that wasn't designed to trick them into killing themselves.
For this reason, nothing discovered by Islamic scholars came into use in Europe until after it had been translated by a Westerner (and so published under a friendlier-looking name).
And yes, this is why the Renaissance was such an explosion: because all we had to do was take our heads out of our asses, and knowledge was right there for the taking.
Anyway, I'm reading my textbook, and after talking to me in earnest tones for chapters about racism (and other isms), how the white race in America is completely unaware of and needs to be made aware of the injustices still faced by other races, how the privileged class must be taught to recognize that privilege -- after acknowledging that we are considered historically illiterate -- is now more or less holding my hand and reassuring me that efforts to educate African Americans were "greatly enhanced by sympathetic and humanitarian white friends".
There's a reason why white people don't consider themselves a race. It starts with the fact that black is so often capitalized, and continues into the part where we're rarely even specified as American, let alone European American. We're encouraged to think of ourselves not as a race, but as a color, and not even a real color, but white: all the colors in the frickin' rainbow. I don't know about you guys, but I'm not white -- I'm a sort of pale peach color.
But this kind of dreck doesn't help. I've read less than two pages of narrow paragraphs and large print talking about the early struggle to obtain any form of education for black (brown?) folk. None of it has really acknowledged the enemy being fought. There has been no effort whatsoever to make me feel guilty for the actions of my race -- nothing to even suggest these noble soldiers were fighting against us, rather than green space aliens bent on educating only rich white males. Even the passage that states early Christians worked hard to get around "an unwritten law that a Christian should not be a slave" -- in other words, to convert and moderately educate their slaves without feeling morally-obligated to free them -- is written in such a way that makes it sound as though the reader should go "Whoo hoo! Go you, Baptists, for first deciding to let them learn to read and thus leading to modern educational efforts!"
Stop teaching white children that only their efforts have ever given other people access to dignity and equality, and stop acting like our one moment in a thousand of actually behaving like decent human beings is worthy of Mother Theresa-level praise.
In short: I'm being reassured that white people are good and helpful before I've even had to deal with the idea that we might not have been. (I'm serious when I say that we might as well have banded together against those green aliens, there's nothing in here about our thinking they were inferior.)
This is only outclassed by the chapter's initial statement that our historical illiteracy should be fixed by learning more about the Founding Fathers and our great nation. The textbook author clearly hasn't put this much thought into it, but maybe that historical illiteracy accusation is more about the fact that you just spent two paragraphs summarizing early Chinese education as being only about religion, conformity, and obedience, and then two pages talking in glowing terms about the Greeks (who were actually educated in Egypt, thanks for your one sentence about that in your one paragraph about Egypt) and the Romans that followed them.
No, historical literacy does not "inevitably" lead to "the truest form of patriotism". Historical literacy would probably involve learning that we aren't, you know, the one tiny bright light in a dark, empty world of other, alien cultures that don't value democracy or individualism. :(
ARGH. sfd';sfa' Stupid, stupid textbooks.