A better test is checking them against Tony Benn’s five questions on democracy (or power, depending on the source)
What power have you got?
Where did you get it from?
In whose interests do you use it?
To whom are you accountable?
How do we get rid of you?
Erdogan has definite issues around questions one, three, four and five.
When did you last check? How did you last check? Why did you last check? With whom did you last check? What did you last check? Where did you last check?
Many aspects of history aren’t covered in “history class”.
A proper course in history should give you the proper grounding in the techniques needed for historical research. Be wary that you don’t trade one myth for another.
Wait, I’m not sure you realize I’m talking about high school history class- I’m in high school. My complaint is about public education, which never promised me an understanding of the techniques of historical research, just a basic understanding of the US got to be where it is today, and failed at that in a lot of ways especially in not mentioning a lot of military “intervention” by the US.
The U.S. history and government curriculum I was taught in high school fell short (and thus underserving us students) in this way, too. Our 11th grade teacher was an exception. He spent at least a few days in total discussing dark chapters like Teddy Roosevelt’s imperialism and the Bay of Pigs invasion. What made him so exceptional is that he was supposedly teaching us about U.S. government and macroeconomics, not history. Evidently, he saw all three as inextricably intertwined. Which they are.
Your complaint is not about public education but the curriculum imposed on you by conservative values.
It’s not going to be better when it all goes charter.
True—to clarify, I like the idea of public education, something we all deserve in a huge and complicated world, and trying to make it a Successful Child (with Correct Moral Beliefs) Factory goes against that principle in every possible way.
How does one avoid that? Our idea of objective education is always going to involve some perspective of success with correct beliefs, even if sticking to facts.
A+ for excellent historical analysis!
You weren’t in my class. 
I think this is a much bigger discussion but I’ll try to summarize my thoughts so far:
I really mean it when I say it’s a factory, and I hate that model. It makes it very easy to optimize Successful Child Production for some particular quantifiable goal like test scores or adherence to a set of imposed values. People learn willingly and happily by being part of a community, hence students’ natural tendency to make clubs and study groups, and care passionately about marching band and sports teams (things that require lots of learning and hard work) while hating math class. So I think an official curriculum should be restricted to more basic and broad subjects, and definitely in more applied way (math) and the much larger purpose of school should be to provide resources and academic freedom by creating primarily student-run communities. Having a community of people to learn with is the only good thing about high school right now for me.
I guess that’s more like a college in a lot of ways but sometimes colleges can end up using a factory-like system as well, instead of seeing education as a service and school as a community.
I don’t know how much, if at all, you agree with me on the destruction of capitalism, but capital sure does provide a great incentive for turning every system into a factory. Sort of an “all you have is a hammer so everything looks like a nail” thing.
How do you believe this is incorporated in Socialist nations, then?
The factory model certainly is not anti-Communist either.
Well, that depends on what kind of communism you’re talking about…
I think depending on the kind of factory, it’s not always a bad system for doing things efficiently, it’s not anti-communist in itself, but when people are the product, it seems to me that there’s no way a factory-like system can serve the collective good.
All I can do right now to restructure the educational system that I have is to build those communities with other students so that we’re not entirely reliant on a system that doesn’t care about us for our education. As for the nation as a whole, I’m not in charge of policy and I don’t know nearly as much about the specifics of the system as a lot of other people, but, like I said, the general direction I’d like to go is to try to have a more basic curriculum and focus on having all students be able to achieve that instead of focusing on a few, more “worthy” students taking AP classes while others get a “lower level” education- people talk a lot about the Finnish model of education and I think there’s a lot to learn from that.
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