how do you spend your days.

[yourmammasdream]

I am, lately, horrified by what I don't know, and what I know now that I never did before. I am passionate, because despite my having said it before, I am aware now of why Holocaust education needs to be revised in the coming years. How, for G-d's sake, can we teach it without talking about Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Darfur? How many names do I not

Comments

[troublelover]

that's like asking how they teach history in the u.s, it has a lot to do with where you live, where you're from, and where you go to school. i live in buenos aires so i do not see a lot of "descendents of conquistadors and conquered" here because this is essentially the "melting pot" of south america. the immigrant population here is huge and meeting a porteño (buenos aires native) with a german or chinese or english last name is just as likely, if not more so, than meeting someone with a spanish sounding last name. as a result the teaching of history here depends mostly on what university you're at because the student bodies at each institution are different and correspond with the teaching styles of the professor. example: uca, the private catholic university of buenos aires, is more "conservative" in their teachings and the history of argentina course i was shopping was very eurocentric, but they offer courses on the history of the americas and it's required if you're carrera here is history. the students are all younger and it says something that their families can afford to send them to private school especially dealing with the economic crisis here and whatnot. at uba, the public, more "liberal" university of buenos aires, is humongous and the student population is mostly argentine. you have students from all walk of life and all ages who are there to learn, not necessarily to make mommy and daddy proud by getting a diploma from the UCA.

i guess the short answer to your question would be that they teach history with the assumption that the students in the classroom have a more than adequate background of their OWN backgrounds, and that they teach the european influence in latin america as an essential part of their culture but they expose it for what it is as european imperialism. which is a hell of a lot better than i can say for a public school education on united states history in the united states, in my opinion.

also, clumping all of latin america together is hardly a way to consider how they teach history here, and each country has a very unique history and relation with spain (and england, italy, germany etc) and very individual histories in terms of how the people of these countries have dealt with the politics of suchs. how do they teach history in latin america? in cuba, the emphasis on the negatives of "yankee" and european imperialism are obvious, but those are factual statements and they're not so much reiterated as acknowledged in other countries in the carribean and south america.

hope that helped. also, columbus day here is viewed like heads or tails of the same coin. yeah, the discovery of america is huge, no one is negating that. with that, though, you need to acknowledge hundreds of years of racial, ethnic, and political cleansing that established relationships between the peoples of the americas and the rest of the world for economic or ideological reasons. it's imperialism. take it for what it is and stop excusing it is what i have a problem with.