Originally published at: Texas school administrator tells teachers to provide "opposing perspective" to books about the Holocaust | Boing Boing
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I am 100% pro “opposing the Holocaust” … the problem is, it’s not possible to oppose something that happened 80 years ago (unless we get a time machine or something – but we all know how the “kill Hitler” plots end up going wrong in any time machine story).
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Apparently, the first place our new special envoy for combating antisemitism needs to head is Texas…
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I can see only two “opposing views” possible. Either the Holocaust didnt happen, or it did happen but it was a good thing. Both would teach kids to hate Jews.
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Other “hotly debated current topics” include:
- The germ theory of disease
- Homeopathy
- Whether non-White individuals are “people”
- Whether women have the same number of ribs as men
- The age of the Earth
- Whether the so-called “Moon landings” were faked
- The shape of the Earth
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The ones I left listed are actually worth debating in that the opposing side does try to make some kind of a semblance of an argument which is falsifiable which makes it a good case study in a class about logic or the scientific method or any kind of argumentation. Too bad public schools are just “give back the answers in the text book” kind of education model and not one that’s more interactive and useful.
Also the right theories that persisted solve problems that their alternatives could not. For example, age of the Earth was one issue that even classical physicists didn’t quite grasp until many years later that was bolstered by geological theories like continental drift and Darwinism to give us an age range and then radiological evidence giving us the precise age we have now (give or case some millions of years but nothing huge versus the billions of years the planet age is).
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“How do you oppose the Holocaust?” one teacher said in response.
“Believe me,” Peddy said. “That’s come up.”
That is the best part.
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This is why I hate modern education. It’s just full of rote rehearsal and little in the way of actually discussing these issues. So when touchy issues like race come up parents and politicians just demand silly laws and policies that just make it impossible to discuss history with any degree of nuance. Like getting into the nitty gritty of slavery in the South or discussing the autobiographical histories of Holocaust survivors are things that don’t come up until college and even then very rarely. I didn’t even know about the Tulsa Massacre until years later from someone bringing it up on a Discord server I’m on. That’s how bad modern education is. It’s just pure propaganda with little in the way of useful skills beyond essential literacy.
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It’s remarkable how quickly “anti-CRT laws only target a narrow class of activist literature that’s blatantly inappropriate for children” turned into “we must put David Irving in their christmas stockings”
Not really that surprising, it’s the result they were angling for. Say it’s about one thing, make the law as vague and nebulous as you can because that will frighten teachers into silence about any teaching of historical (non-controversial unless you’re a white supremacist) facts. We all knew this was what they were angling for.
Yep. That’s called “teaching critical thinking,” and the GOP HATES that, too. “You’re undermining parent’s authority.” Yes, they’ve literally said that about critical thinking courses.
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It’s remarkable how quickly “anti-CRT laws only target a narrow class of activist literature that’s blatantly inappropriate for children” turned into “we must put David Irving in their christmas stockings”
@beschizza, I’d argue that this is a good thing. People need to start arguing for “opposing viewpoints” for every single little thing, in order to show the absurdity of the law and start making the people who pushed this stupidity have to defend it more robustly. Christianity? Something on Satanism. That’s an easy one, though.
- Pythagoras makes my kids uncomfortable. I’d like to see a discussion of Babylonian triplets as outlined in the Plimpton 322 tablet, which shows they “discovered” this 1300 years previously.
- The Japanese were right to attack Pearl Harbor. After all the Dutch were pushing them out of the oil and rubber markets of the East Indies.
- The earth could, after all, be flat.
- Muslims as the source for major scientific discoveries, every time one is brought up.
- China as the source for various things western culture takes credit for.
And so on and so on. Absolutely drench them in this kind of thing.
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Ah. Well, unfortunately this is the tip of hate-iceburg currently crushing Carroll ISD. A group of parents got all hot and bothered by the district’s diversity and inclusion plan, threw a bunch of money and vitriol around, sued over it, and got two right wingers (one of whom sounds very like an extremist) elected to the school board. The suit resulted in an injunction effectively banning the school board from discussing racism. All under the banner of “parental rights.”
Racism, anti-semitism, and anti-LGBTQ+ issues at a district that was at least making an attempt to address those issues de-railed by a bunch of white assholes without anything better to do.
If you would like to read more, below are some news articles that are pretty accurate about the situation. I’m glad this is getting national coverage but I really feel for the BIPOC, Jewish, and LGBTQ+ students stuck there. And hell, all the others. Texas has a teacher shortage right now and a lot of those Carroll ISD teachers might be headed somewhere else soon.
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And LGBTQ+ and Roma and Slavs and socialists and the wrong kind of Christian and…
I’ve seen abusive comments that talk dismissively about the “Homocaust”, and claims that trans people didn’t exist in the 1930s so they couldn’t have been killed by Nazis. Ten years ago they were the far right fringe, now it is more common.
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When the holocaust is taught at the HS level, or below, they are almost always left out of the narrative. And the Jews almost always are depicted as “lambs to the slaughter…” 
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It is. That she’s so blasé about it speaks volumes about her and her community.
All those incidents of anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers disrupting school board meetings and intimidating teachers and administrators? This is the underlying end goal.
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Plus there’s almost no talk about how other nations were preventing German Jews from immigrating during that time.
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One of many reasons to be teaching statistics and what was once called “rhetoric” rather than racing along to calculus in the secondary (or even grades 7-8) curriculum. Rather than teach them how to be critical of “just so” topics, give them the tools for thinking critically and dissecting arguments, and then apply them to subjects that aren’t parental hot buttons.
For instance, a lot of self-described Christians go off the rails regarding set theory and all of the mathematics based on it (which is essentially all of it) because “only God is infinite.” Silly, but there you are. On the other hand, if you teach someone to ask the rather simple question of “what is the largest cardinal integer” and then observe that whatever N is chosen, by the definition of cardinal integers is that they are closed under addition and therefore N+1 is also a cardinal integer …
$HERSELF recounts that one of her HS teachers (early 60s) simply told his classes that there were some books which the District (or legislature) had forbidden him to use in his classes so please don’t bring them up. Worked a charm.
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The allies are always the “good guys” who rode in to save the day handily except for those evil Soviets, who ethnically cleansed all those innocent Germans right out of Eastern Europe, and then the Germans are immediately the good guys right after the war… and of course, the German people were never fully aware of what was happening… which is complete bullshit. No one ever talks about how the Soviets basically saved our bacon in the war. If the Nazis had not broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the war would have gone in a very different direction. The allies might still have won, but not as decisively. I suspect that in that case, there would still have been a fascist central Europe after the war.
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Obtuse, racist, racistly obtuse, or obtusely racist? Spin the wheel.
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They’re just racist. They know what they are doing.
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