2.) “setting aside a part of each school day (from K-12) for critically thinking…”
It is unwise to ask an opinion before facts are given. IMHO, education should seek to lay a groundwork of facts from 6-9 yrs. from 10-13 should focus on teaching communication skills (not that these are ignored earlier, but build on them). And teach critical thinking from 14-18.

His first imperative the social-engineer’s desire to tell “noble lies” to kiddies to make them happy about present arrangements; white folks running the world, we’re on the winning side, god’s in his heaven and all’s well with the world.

His second imperative is to tell the truth without regard for its political or cultural consequences. Here is Hastings’s big picture and take-home message of history.

“History is the story of the dominance, however unjust, of societies that display superior energy, ability, technology and might.”

Hastings acknowledges that it is difficult to feel warm and fuzzy about his big picture, hence the necessity for teachers to tell some “noble lies” to protect the kiddies from the hard truth.

But Hastings’s big picture isn’t so big after all. Certainly the West has been the great generator of historical energy for the last 500 years. And some of it has been in the form of “hard power” as characterised by Hastings above.

However, I assert that Western ideas about human equality, tolerance, secularism, rule of law, pursuit of happiness, etc., etc., have been more influential than exercises in hard power.

And many of these Western ideas have been taken on by nations and cultures that suffered Western imperialism. Western imperialism has thus been curtailed by Western ideas. This is a much more interesting story than mono-dimensional assertions of “hard power” favoured by Hastings. And it may even engage the kiddies.

To apply this insight to Rosa Parks: she descended from slaves with no civil rights. Formal freedom after the end of the American Civil War was mocked by segregationism. As a member of a leftt wing organisation she learned about liberty, equality, fraternity. She also learned about the tactics of Daniel O’Connell, Michael Davitt and Gandhi.

These figures represent an important and liberating inheritance of the West. Every kiddie in every country would profit from learning about them much more than learning about Rhodes or Pizarro or Cortes.

I don’t think it’s true. Before I was 6 years old, one of my uncles told me there were tigers living in the bush on Gran’s farm. I now no longer believe this (what with Gran’s farm being in NZ where there is a distinct shortage of wild tigers), nor do I rebel against it in any meaningful way. And if simply not believing something is rebelling, then the statement is as true after age 6 as before. We either believe what we are told or we don’t believe.

And “2. tell all children different stuff, but have some means of managing or coping with the resulting culture war.”

I think we can cope with the resulting culture war. I can’t think of a single culture in recorded history that has managed to teach all kids younger than 6 the same things (perhaps the Spartans?), yet society has gone on surviving.

It’s fascinating how mythmaking affects even the most basic verifiable facts. For instance, that “tired old woman” was 42 years old at the time of her arrest, yet she’s always portrayed as a grandmotherly figure. Though this seems a little ridiculous today, you can see how it would have been helpful at the time. A grandmotherly Rosa Parks was figure more likely to be beyond reproach, harder to spin as a mere troublemaker, and more in line with the Christian imagery from which the civil rights movement drew. sd #2’s point about “What would you have the schools do?” may or may not point to the best way to teach history, but it is helpful in showing how this particular myth grew.

Well, yes … and no … but what is truth? The unvarnished record of what took place in a certain place at a certain time? If so, then maybe we should begin archiving the tapes of the countless security and surveillance cameras that surround us all. Certainly an unvarnished witness to our history and a treasure-trove for future historians.

All thilngs are historical: every subject, indlcluding religion evolves and what we believe today is not wahat was taught and accepted previously…Make it new, said Pound. But so much of history is filled with lies, distortions and myths.

Isn’t this one of those political myths that gain currency (like Jim Callaghan saying ‘Crisis what crisis?’)

My understanding was that Charles Clark dismissed the mediaeval scholastic model of educational funding, rather than mediaeval studies, and that this nuance got lost in the subsequent reporting.

ie he was dismissing the notion that obligation between the academic community and wider society was in one direction (the peasants having a duty to support the university) and to emphasise that there was a second duty (the university having a duty to provide some wider social good, however defined, in return for that financial support).

I think this is key – Dawkins goes as far as to say it’s a built in evolutionary mechanism, and the opinion of the Jesuits on this topic is well known.

If it is true that anything you are told before the age of 6 you will either believe or rebel against life-long, there are 3 choices:

1. tell all children the same stuff, so they share the same basic assumptions and can use reason and evidence to work through differences
2. tell all children different stuff, but have some means of managing or coping with the resulting culture war.
3. forbid any contact between adults and children

On the whole, the first option is least worst.

soru

The perspective and (given time constraints) selection of history taught will always leave a particular impression. All study of the past is thus flawed, as post-modernists so gleefully point out. But there is no need to throw out the baby with the bath-water, nor to resign to ourselves that outright misinformation is inevitable. The truth can be approached asymptotically, even if it is not fixed. Hasting’s clumsy effort to revive GR Elton is only as daft as the “social engineering” behind a multi-cultural agenda. Maybe historical teaching should side-step these issues as far as possible, and teach the most immutable truths it can?