Faulty history instruction. Ultimately, who is responsible for what you put in your body? And because it's Friday, the connection between the Hindu religion and our word "thug".
Faulty history instruction.
The YouTube video linked first below popped up in my suggested videos and it got me thinking.
There is more detail there, but Mr. Sowell (someone I have read and listened to multiple times before) mentions a particular practice in some history classes these days: an assignment where the student is to take the perspective of someone back in history and write a narrative based on that.
So, maybe you'd write what a slave owner thought about efforts to outlaw slavery. Maybe (and this was the example Sowell uses) you'd write as an Indian what you thought about white settlers moving in.
On its face, this seems a decent enough exercise in my view, but it, as is often the case, depends greatly on how its done.
If it is done as Mr. Sowell has it, that is, if the exercise is done with the student writing from the perspective of a modern individual, it might be a tool for creative writing, but it is not history.
History would be relating what happened and giving the perspective of those that lived it. In other words, a historical perspective from one of my examples above be learning how slaveholders justified putting another in bondage, taking that perspective, and sharing it. A historical perspective would be learning how slavery contemporaneously manifested across different regions, peoples, countries in the world and sharing that.
Mr. Sowell characterizes lessons where students write about the past from the present perspective as examples of propaganda and/or indoctrination. While I don't disagree that this is the case in some classrooms, I think it's a bit of an overstatement, an overgeneralization.
You see, it is possible that doing this is a valid lesson. It is a reasonable exercise for students of, say, persuasive writing or rhetoric to look back on what was and state their opinion. It is not history, but it is a reasonable lesson.
It is also possible that well-meaning, but ignorant/lazy teachers view this as a good lesson in history even if they're not actively trying to indoctrinate a child. It does tick off boxes for a classroom activity: it gets the kids working and doesn't require much outside research or effort on their part. Doesn't mean it's okay or good teaching, but it also doesn't make it something done with bad intent.
Let's wrap up by bringing this back to Colorado. What if you were worried about such things happening in your child's classroom? My advice to you will look familiar if you've read this page long enough. You as the parent need to pay attention to the specific details of what you child is learning and what they're doing in class. There is no substitute.
The reason I say that is twofold.
1. When you look at what Colorado is doing for history classes (I linked to our state standards second below should you want to look over what they require for "History" across grades) you will see language more akin to what call history than what Mr. Sowell describes. That is, I wouldn't worry about this coming down from on high.
2. Knowing what I know about how wiggly standards are and how much (how little?) supervision there is of an individual teacher's instruction, there is the possibility of encountering faulty instruction like Mr. Sowell mentions. Either by a teacher intending to propagandize or by one being thoughtless, the possibility is there. The only way to know this and work against it is, again, for you to be involved in your young one's schooling. What is your child's teacher doing down to the nuts and bolts level? Ask about assignments, check worksheets, and etc.
One last thing, something that will also look familiar. No matter what goes on in your kid's school, do not forget that education doesn't stop at the schoolhouse door.
You educate your child and you teach your child everyday. You have the chance to offer counterpoint to the things they learn outside the home. Don't shirk your responsibility to do so.
https://www.cde.state.co.us/cosocialstudies/2020cas-ss-p12
Related:
Interview below with Colorado's new state historian. Worth a read; you should get to know the perspectives of people in these tiny, seemingly-forgettable offices.
https://www.cpr.org/2023/11/29/new-state-historian-interview/
Who, ultimately, is responsible for what you put in your body?
Absent things like mental disease or defect, we have choices. They may not be pleasant choices. They may not be choices we like. But we have choices.
I remember seeing quite a bit on social media about the rash of homeless people in Denver dying Saturday. I didn't realize that the deaths were (apparently) overdoses and not related to the cold and weather until I saw the Next segment linked below.
Notably, to me at least, missing from this segment is the idea of personal responsibility.
Ultimately, who puts the drugs into your body? Does someone else inject you against your will? Does the government use its powers of coercion to do so?
I hear the arguments made by the advocates on the show: we need to offer safe places with overdose prevention medication, and that the homeless turn to drugs to cope with their lifestyle. This is easing another's self-destruction. It's confusing mitigating circumstances with culpability.
In neither case is there something to address the full root cause of an drug overdose. Thus neither solution will fully solve the problem. It might delay it, it might move the problem either in time or geographically, but it will not "cure" drug addiction and it will not stop drug-assisted self-destruction.
While we are creatures molded by both nature and nurture, this reality does nothing to counter the idea that, in many circumstances, we arecreatures who have free will.
We should help someone overdosing on drugs; I'm okay with keeping Narcan inhalers in public places, and I'm just as okay with someone choosing to personally carry one. Additionally, I believe we should be offering ways for people to crawl up out of the hole of addiction. In fact, you could think of rescuing someone who is overdosing as being an example of offering them that hand up.
What we shouldn't do is ignore reality. The reality that we are responsible for what we choose to do to ourselves. The reality that we are limited in what we can force others to do. The reality that we cannot help others until we acknowledge that all we can really offer is an opportunity for them to help themselves.
How we offer matters. Because we can offer in a way that honors our dignity and responsibility to our fellow humans, that honors the dignity and responsibility of the individual we are trying to help, and that will ultimately result in clean, sober, productive, and safe fellow humans.
Or we can choose to offer help that gives the message that Next here seems to promote. We can treat people as entirely products of their environment, take on the awesome responsibility of somehow making their entire environment better so that they will succeed, and that we should be offering comfort along their march toward their own destruction.
It's like I tell my new students: go home and tell ya momma that you met a thug.
Okay, I don't say that in earnest, but I do sometimes say it.
It's that time of the week again. The last post til Sunday and thus it's something for fun and not related to politics.
I was listening to an audiobook on the Hindu religion and learned some interesting things.**
Thought I'd share.
The word "thug" actually comes to us from the Hindu religion, as thugs were a religious group whose sacraments included violence, both robbery and murder.
The thugs would rob and murder travelers, giving a third of their plunder as sacrifice to Kali, a Hindu goddess.
I'm sure there were people involved in this group who likely had cynical motives, but I gather from what I've read since and heard before, there were people in the group who were genuinely motivated by religion. That is, these acts were their honest worship.
Another case of religion being used to treat someone else horribly.
There's more in the link (esp more on etymology) if you're curious.
As an interesting side note, and touching on the top line above, some of the background reading I did noted how the word has morphed in English since being imported, in particular how it starts to carry some more positive connotations than it had when it first was borrowed.
So, now you have something to impress people at parties with: you can tell them about the etymology of our word thug (with Hindu religion being the LAST place I would have expected it to come from).
Have a good Friday and see you again on Sunday!
**One of which was not so much a new fact, but a thought that it inspired. This was a series of lectures by an American professor who is an expert in Hinduism. The man is well traveled and knowledgeable, but it got me wondering what someone who grew up as a Hindu would think of the lectures and also what it would be like to take a class on Christianity from someone who grew up as a Hindu in India. I don't think either is bad, of course, I just wonder what it would be like.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/thug