Left2Right Comments

James Oakes wrote: "In the end, what’s the difference between history as preached under Lynne Cheney’s American nationalist dispensation and Molefi Asante’s black nationalist dispensation? Both demand the impressment of history into the service of ideology."

Well, as a parent, I have a definite and strong opinion as to what/how history and other subjects should be taught to my children and what I want taught and how I want it taught is primarily to help indoctrinate my children with the culture that I think is important for their future and the future of the country and world. If the parents of Philadelphia want to have Afrocentrism taught with "pseudo-facts", so be it, that's their right, in my opinion. I think that true believers in diversity would allow or even encourage parents to have their children taught in diverse ways, even if "incorrect."
 

Putting the word incorrect in scare quotes doesn't change the fact that we shouldn't be encouraging parents to teach their children false things that sound nice. If you can call that history with a straight face, then you have no appreciation for what history actually is.
 

lpfabulous wrote: "...we shouldn't be encouraging parents to teach their children false things that sound nice..."

Personally, I agree in that I wouldn't want to teach my children incorrect history just so it sounds nice. But I would not want to tell other parents that they should not have their children taught "incorrect" history if that's what they think there children require to grow into the kind of adults they think best. Also, there's only time to study a tiny sliver of history during school hours (plus homework). Picking which sliver turns history from politically correct to "incorrect". There are plenty of examples of good and evil for all cultures that are actual historical events. Someone putting together a history curriculum has a lot of lattitude in painting whatever picture they like.

lpfabulous also wrote: "If you can call that history with a straight face, then you have no appreciation for what history actually is."

Agreed. Note that I did not use the word 'history' anywhere near "incorrect".
 

"Note that I did not use the word 'history' anywhere near 'incorrect'."

Are you being sarcastic again, or simply dishonest? Do you really mean to imply that by inserting lots of type-space between two words, you remove any implied connection between them? The subject is "history," your characterization is "incorrect," and your meaning is plain.

And besides, didn't you just use the phrase, "'incorrect' history?"
 

pickabone, I'm not following your analysis, but I'm not sure it's material anyway.

There's only one point that I'm trying to make: what is taught to my children is none of your business or James Oakes' business. Similarly, what is taught to other children is only the business of the parents of those children and to those that said parents entrust the education of their children to. If those parents want their children to be taught "nice history", so be it.
 

Bret,

Please. You contradicted yourself, implying that you had never characterized certain historical teachings as "incorrect," when you actually had. Just trying to keep you honest.

As to whether its any of my business what your children are taught, your view of the parent's role in curriculum design is overly ego-centric. You're free to teach your children whatever you like, but you've no right to demand that educators participate in your "indoctrination" simply because it reflects your preference. If you find a school that matches your preference, send your kids there. If you wish to influence the curriculum, join the PTA or whatever forum the school offers for such input. But schools should expect more than "because I wanna" as your argument.

Like it or not, the educator's primary obligation is not to the parent, but to the student. How best to meet that obligation is served well by input from the parent, but only as a component contribution alongside legitimate pedagogy. What constitutes legitimate? The material must first be factually accurate. Second, it must be relavent. Third, it must be significant. There are undoubtedly more factors to be considered. Any suggestions?

Schools have the responsibility to prepare students for constructive participation in society as well as to determine what that preparation requires. Teaching them only what their parents want them to know is an abrogation of this responsibility, especially when parents demand their children learn a lie.
 

Bret says "what is taught to my children is none of your business." Actually, it is, particularly if your child attends a public school. Once you send your child to a public school, the rest of us citizens and the government we elect get to establish the standards. Of course, you can teach your child whatever nonsense you want if you're home schooling or after school hours. Tell your child that 2 + 2 = 5 or the moon is made of green cheese if you want -- but don't be too suprised if she bombs on the SATs.
 

as a high school student, i'm being taught history right now; i'm being taught the history that has been mandated for me, and i know it. it is true that my parents could join the PTA if they wanted to influence what im learning. they could also raise me to focus on another "sliver" of history. that way, instead of two authorities arguing over what sliver of history i should be taught, ill gain more insight into history by being taught two distinctly different slivers. not to mention my own studies of and interest in history.

any parent with sufficient interest to fight the school system, or write in a blog about it, should just go ahead and use the energy to teach their kids what they want. and other students in my public high school won't have to listen to the burnt-out hippie crap my parents tell me, whether or not its a good thing.
 

pickabone wrote: "Like it or not, the educator's primary obligation is not to the parent, but to the student."

Perhaps, but the concept of "parent/guardian" is that they get to decide what's right for the child on every other topic. Neither other parents nor society as a whole is allowed to intervene except in extreme situations (e.g. child abuse). Why not education?

pickabone also wrote: "How best to meet that obligation is served well by input from the parent, but only as a component contribution alongside legitimate pedagogy. What constitutes legitimate?"

At the moment, what constitutes "legitimate" is what the school board says is legitimate. For example, in Kansas, teaching Intelligent Design as science is legitimate. I don't want my children taught Intelligent Design or, for that matter, afrocentrism, thanks. That's why I'm dead set against having people or entities thousands of miles away from me deciding what my child should be taught.

jan wrote: "Once you send your child to a public school, the rest of us citizens and the government we elect get to establish the standards."

Given that the rest of the citizens are embracing Intelligent Design and "nice history", are you really going to be happy with your children being taught that?
 

"Neither other parents nor society as a whole is allowed to intervene except in extreme situations (e.g. child abuse). Why not education?"

First, take note that there are laws requiring that children between the ages of 6 and 16 receive an education. I'm not sure if there is a federal statute on the matter, or if each and every state has such a law, but most do. It is in fact considered by many (myself included) to be a form of negligent abuse for a parent to allow a child to go without a proper education.

That said, home-schooling is an option, as are private and perochial schools. However, when people enroll their children in public schools, the state bears the responsibility of providing that education. To meet this obligation (as with any obligation), the school system must be allotted a certain degree of autonomy and authority over its own operations, to determine curriculum, staffing, rules of conduct, etc. Otherwise, school systems would be paralyzed.

"At the moment, what constitutes 'legitimate' is what the school board says is legitimate."

Take away the scare-quotes (you really like those, don't you?) and you get a very different picture. In the example you give, Kansas and its adoption of ID, the school board operated in bad faith, determining what to teach based not on pedagogical legitimacy but instead on political power and personal preference. This is exactly what you've been arguing for all along, except that in this case, it's other people's preference and not your own. ID and Afrocentrism, in my opinion, lack legitimacy regardless of who abuses their political influence to insert them into the curriculum.
 

pickabone wrote: "Take away the scare-quotes (you really like those, don't you?)"

"Yes", "I" "really" "do" "!!!"

pickabone also wrote: "ID and Afrocentrism, in my opinion, lack legitimacy regardless of who abuses their political influence to insert them into the curriculum."

We're in agreement on the lack of "legitimacy" ("love" "those" "scare" "quotes") of ID and Afrocentrism, at least from a subjective standpoint. But there are a couple things to keep in mind. First, the Kansas school board doesn't believe it's acting in "bad faith" (this is an actual quote, not a scare quote), indeed, they believe they're doing the "right" ("yes", "this" "one" "is" "a" "scare" "quote") thing. Second, at the end of the day, politics and power decide what is taught. And that's why I want what's taught to my children controlled by me (or at least as close to home as possible).

I agree that home schooling, private and parochial schools are an important option, and if my local schools start teaching things that I think are beyond the pale, I will utilize that option. Unfortunately, the poor don't have that option, and that's not fair that they should have to have their children taught things that they vehemently oppose.
 

Here's another example of what's becoming to be considered "legitimate pedagogy": ethnomathematics:

---

"Now mathematics is being nudged into a specifically political direction by educators who call themselves "critical theorists." They advocate using mathematics as a tool to advance social justice.

"Partisans of social-justice mathematics advocate an explicitly political agenda in the classroom. A new textbook, "Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers," shows how problem solving, ethnomathematics and political action can be merged. Among its topics are: "Sweatshop Accounting," with units on poverty, globalization and the unequal distribution of wealth."

Yuck!
 

" Here's another example of what's becoming to be considered 'legitimate pedagogy'"

My point is that your own proposal that school boards should decide curriculum based on personal preferences (which are normally cultural and political, not educational, in nature) is what leads to this kind of illegitimate pedagogy. You specifically say that the preferences should be those of the parents (as opposed to marginal academics). Fine, that sounds lovely. But this is what happens. People falsely claim to speak for the parents, or they manipulate or find common ground with enough parents and militate on their behalf for this kind of teaching. Once you say that legitimacy is a product of power imposing its preferences on others, you open the door to this kind of abuse.
 

This notion that parents can do whatever they'd like with their children, provided they don't abuse them, requires defense. It seems to me to rest on one of the following premises: 1) That parents know what's best for their children, and/or 2) That parents have certain rights with regard to their children that do not depend on the parents' having surer knowledge of what's best for the children. 1) is at least partly an empirical matter, and I suspect that in many cases, it's false. As for 2): What is the source of these rights, and what is their extent?

Another point: In a democracy, where each of us exercises some power over others, we all have an interest in seeing that children -- and yes, even other peoples' children -- are educated properly. An ill-educated majority is something that we all (rightly) fear. Now, this does not mean that we can do anything we want to ensure an educated citizenry. But making sure that children are equipped with the knowledge and reason to be good citizens strikes me as permissible.

Finally: This business about the subjectivity of science and history is a bit overblown, in my view. There are genuine scientific and historical facts, and some methods have proven vastly more successful at getting to those facts than have other methods. All of this is presupposed in our demarcation of science and history as important subjects in the first place.

-Young City
 

Bret: that ethnomathematics is darn scary. Glad I never had to deal with that.

Pickabone: I think the argument is that someone has to decide what/how to teach the kids, and that letting the parents decide is better than most other options. Anyone making a decision will make it based on someone's "personal preferences," no matter how much you wish it otherwise; the only question is what sort of basis those preferences have. I, like you, (think I) base my preferences on science, critical thought, and hard-nosed reason; but they're still my preferences. We need some mechanism for deciding whose preferences to use.

There's still an argument that we should use the experts' preferences, but that leaves important questions unanswered. Which experts? The ID people certainly think that they're "experts," as do the people pushing Afrocentrism. You can teach according to "the consensus of leading academics," or some standard like that, but that's a pretty amorphous standard that can be made to mean pretty much whatever the school board wants. And even if you could enforce it seriously, you've just managed to ban all attempts at innovation and all tests of differnt pedagogical methods. That doesn't seem like such a good idea.

Anonymous: it's not as much that parents know what's best for their children, as that someone has to make decisions about how to raise kids, and that parents are, in general, more fit to exercise this authority than anyone else you can point at. There are exceptions, of course, and when parents display profound incompetence then we remove their authority, but we try to maintain it as often as possible.

It's generally a fairly bad idea to centralize stuff more than necessary. If I get to decide what to teach my kid, I can screw him (and only him) up. That's bad. If I get to decide what to teach the kids of everyone in my school district, I can screw them all up. That's worse. If I get to decide what to teach all the kids in the nation, I can screw them all up. That's even worse.

In a way, I think that this entire issue is a product of government-run schools. A private schooling system, for all its flaws, wouldn't force parents to send their kids to a school that teaches stuff they disagree with. Creationist parents would send their kids to creationist schools and not bother the rest of us. But we've withdrawn that ability—they have to go to public schools, unless they want to pay twice—so creationist parents instead try to get the schools that everyone else's kids go to to teach creationism.

And they actually have a legitimate complaint, I think. We force them to subsidize schools that teach material they (incorrectly) consider profoundly misguided; we then tell them that they have to pay double if they don't want their kids taught the same material. I know that if I had kids I'd be extremely irritated by the way most schools handle, say, recycling; I'd not be happy about being forced to pay for my kids to be taught stuff I think is false. I imagine the creationist parents feel the same way.

Running a school and picking a curriculum requires value judgments; our public school system forces the government to get involved in value judgments, which it really shouldn't be doing. It's easily possible that the benefits of a public school system outweigh the costs, but the costs are real, and they can't be avoided as long as our education system is set up like the one we have today.

Finally, your second point cuts both ways. The creationists feel like a majority so ill-educated that it believes in evolution is something rightly to be feared. The Afrocentrists think that a majority not educated according to Afrocentrism is something to be rightly feared. The real impact of your argument would be "the majority has the right to educate kids to think like the majority." That is highly disturbing.
 

Jadagul: Please, it's not "anonymous". It's "Young". "Mr. City" if you're nasty!

You claim that parents are "in general more fit" to make decisions about their own children than others are. While there are exceptions, of course, I'll agree that this is by and large the case. But curriculum choice isn't a matter of who's more fit "in general" to make decisions about children. This is a matter of who's more fit to make decisions about the science and history kids should learn. If we accept that kids should learn the truth, then it seems that, in this limited sphere, parents are NOT ideally suited to make these decisions. Professional science and history educators are.

You also claim that this is a problem resulting from government-run schools. My thinking runs in the opposite direction. I think the prospect of people holing their kids up private or home schools and teaching them whatever the hell they feel like is dangerous for our democracy. The problem isn't that we have public schools. The problem is that we allow parents too much control over certain aspects of those schools. The truths of science and history are not determined by popular opinion; letting parents decide suggests that they are.

As for your value judgment point: Any governmental choice reflects a value judgment. Letting parents rather than experts decide reflects a judgment just as much as the reverse does. (And for what it's worth: What exactly is supposed to be wrong with the state making value judgments?) Maybe what you mean is that, when the state makes curricular decisions, it must make the further decision about which scientific theories or historical theories are correct. Given that the state can marshall resources and experts in a way that parents can't (or won't), it seems quite obvious that the state is in a better position to do this than parents are.

-young city
 

Also, I don't think "the majority has the right to educate kids to think like the majority" is a natural extension of my argument. Here's what is a natural extension of my argument:

If there are methods constitutive of a discipline like science or history, and scholars who have received rigorous training in that discipline have reached certain conclusions by applying those methods, then the majority has the right to teach those conclusions to children. Or better: the CHILDREN THEMSELVES have the right to have those conclusions taught to them.

Honestly, are we really supposed to take seriously, at the dawn of the 21st century, that certain scientific and historical views are not, as an objective matter, more likely to be true than others? I'm just not willing to play Kuhnian relativist with our children's education.

-Young City
 

young city wrote: "If we accept that kids should learn the truth, then it seems that, in this limited sphere, parents are NOT ideally suited to make these decisions. Professional science and history educators are."

Except there are so many examples of debatable truths being taught. In this comment thread and the related post we've already identified Afrocentrism, Intelligent Design, and ethnomathematics as three curricula that some "educators" think are truth, but I do not.

Second, most facts of history are subject to interpretation. For example, was Christopher Columbus a heroic visionary or an evil monster who opened the door for great havoc and misery to be wreaked on an indiginous population? Or both? Historians still argue this. Also consider that the ratings of past presidents change all the time as those who do the rating change. For example, a large majority of current historians think that Bush is a terrible president, but at least one renowned historian thinks "George W. Bush is likely to be remembered as the first great grand strategist of the 21st century."

I just don't believe that there is an objective truth with objective conclusions, especially with regards to history. Thus, I think each parent has the best idea of what subjective version to teach to their children.
 

Bret,

Once you use scarequotes around "educators" in reference to ID defenders, you seem to have conceded that these are precisely NOT the sorts of experts I'm talking about. The fact is that 99.999% of professional scientists sign onto macroevolution. That seems to put it in the same class with heliocentrism.

And since when is "debatable" the new curricular standard? (See your first paragraph.) The existence of the external world is debatable. The validity of inductive inference is debatable. Hell, the truth-preservingness of modus ponens is debatable. These are all relevant to scientific inquiry, right? Why not let the parents decide? My implication is that your standards for what should be on the common curriculum are WAAAY too high. My suspicion is that you're not really a hardcore skeptic about science; instead, you've got some kind of libertarian reason for opposing any sort of common curriculum. Sweet. Let's hear a defense.

You cite two historical controversies, but they're both more-or-less moral evaluations of individuals. There's much more convergence in the historical profession over less value-laden issues: The times, locations, and causes of wars; the origins of various ideas and technologies, etc. Or, at the very least, there's historical convergence about what couldn't be the right answers. So, maybe we don't know who discovered calculus first, Leibniz or Newton, but we sure as hell know it wasn't Descartes, Hume, Ayn Rand, or Rick James.

"I just don't believe that there is an objective truth..." Really? What about (Either P or not-P)? Not objectively true? I hope you just mean that it's often difficult to discover what the truth is, not that there's no truth. A physics example: either the Copenhagen interpretation corresponds to reality or it doesn't, right?

A common thread in this, um, thread seems to be this: If there's even the slightest disagreement on some point, then there's either a) no right answer, or b) there is a right answer, but we have no way of knowing what it is or the best way of getting at it. I just don't see how this follows.

-young city
 

young city wrote: "Once you use scarequotes around "educators" in reference to ID defenders, you seem to have conceded that these are precisely NOT the sorts of experts I'm talking about."

Yes and no. Certainly, I have little respect for those pressing for ID to be taught in the science classroom (though I certainly understand their logic). However, I am also skeptical of any established group of self selected experts, and thus I don't have great respect for the education establishment and those educators that work within it.

young city also wrote: "My implication is that your standards for what should be on the common curriculum are WAAAY too high..."

I don't think that there should be a common curriculum. Each child's, each family's, each community's needs are different. For all I know, it may well be beneficial to teach inner city kids Afrocentrism, even if not quite true. I just don't think that it's particularly useful for my children.

young city also wrote: "There's much more convergence in the historical profession over less value-laden issues: The times, locations..."

Sure, date and place facts are much less contested. Terribly boring though, and by themselves, not particularly useful. The other things you listed may or may not be objective. For example, the first shot fired in a war might be uncontestable, but the sociopolitical tensions leading to that first shot are often open to a wider range of interpretations. Was WWII caused because of the wrongs of the treaty of Versailles or because of Hitler? Some mix, no doubt, with history books laying most of the blame on Hitler. If Hitler had won, the history books would say something much, much different, don't you think?
 

Young: sorry about the anonymous thing, wasn't sure if that was a signature or not. You know you can get it to display a name without signing in, right?

I think your argument is pretty fundamentally authoritarian. One of the core liberal claims is that government has no unique claim on the truth, and that individuals should be free to seek it on their own. That's the point of the 1st Amendment: government should never tell people what to think.

But that's precisely what you're advocating the government do. It has the ability to "marshall resources and experts in a way that parents can't," and so its judgments should trump theirs. That is, in my opinion, profoundly wrong-headed and dangerous, and a step down the path to censorship and thought police.

I agree with you that some statements are objectively true, and others are objectively false. I agree that when I have kids, I'll want them to be taught things that are true, and not to be taught things that are false. But I think the best way to guarantee this is to make sure no one can force me to teach my kid things that aren't true. Once you give someone the power to decide what can and can't be taught—what is and isn't true—he'll wind up using it in ways you don't like. I'd rather have pluralism. Parents raise and teach their kids, with help from others that they solicit, and, deo volente, the truth will win out.

I think your best argument is along the lines that "kids have a right to be taught the truth," not that we as a society have a right to teach them the truth. But this "right" would have to be justified, and can't be simply asserted. I think that this right can't exist, for two reasons.

First, no one knows the truth with absolute certainty. We know we're wrong about somethings, we just don't know which things. Forcing all kids to learn a set of facts because that set of facts is "The Truth" is wrong and barbaric when some of those facts may well be false. Instead, we should allow room for different interpretations, so that kids can grow up to challenge the dominant ideas. Even if the dominant ideas turn out to be false, we generally learn by the process of challenging.

Second, enforcing this universal education requires censorship: the government must make lots of truth judgments that it is neither equipped to make nor justified in making, and violate the rights of everyone else to have free and independent discussions and judgments. This is exactly what the establishment clause, for instance, was trying to prevent.
 

Bret & Jadagul:

Let's assume you're right about how an ideal political society would handle education. Such a society, we'll assume, would be committed to pluralism and diversity when it comes to the opinions, judgments, beliefs, and convictions of its citizens. Hence its laws would remain scrupulously neutral, and would never create a centralized education authority with standardized curricula. As far as the laws of such a neutral society are concerned, evolution might not have occurred, the earth might be the center of the universe, and 2 + 2 might equal 5. Not that these claims aren't false, it's just that the laws don't get to take a stand on the matter.

(Aside: Perfect neutrality is, I think, impossible. You can't have a legal system without discriminating against those who deny the existence of the legal system, or those who deny that the laws say what they say.)

But, granting all that, nothing follows about how our current political society, with its nationalized education system replete with curriculum standards, should be administered. Faced with a question about a real-world political issue, it's something of a dodge to discuss how an ideal political society would handle it. After all, we don't have an ideal political society, we have this one, and there are issues to be resolved.

Suppose a billionaire flat-earther finances a pro-flat-earth campaign that convinces a city (or at least those in the city with political power) to teach its kids that the earth is flat. What do we do? Should we just let it happen? Should we try to stop it from happening? What about Holocaust deniers, astrologers, and UFOlogists? What about those who believe in ghosts and wizards and leprechauns?

Of course, you can be a hardliner and say that we should just let it happen. But as soon as you start setting intellectual standards, rest assured that Afrocentrism and creationism will not meet those standards.
 

jagadul: "Anyone making a decision will make it based on someone's 'personal preferences,' no matter how much you wish it otherwise."

A parent gains no understanding of historiography merely by having a child.  A quality professional educator, though human, develops objective experience that overtakes subjective personal preference as the key determinant in decision-making on the job. To equate the two, professional experience and personal preference, shows profound disrespect for the profession of teaching and the discipline of education.

"[creationists] have to go to public schools, unless they want to pay twice"

Actually, you're not "paying twice" by choosing a private school while continuing to fund public schools through the payment of taxes. Funding public schools is not equivalent to tuition. Your taxes are not paid in exchange for your child's education, they're paid in exchange for the education of the community.
 

Jadagul:

All this "profoundly authoritarian", "thought police" stuff is a bit over the top. All I'm doing, for heaven's sake, is making the argument for public schooling with a common curriculum. This is precisely the status quo, and I don't think it's brought us to dystopia just yet. (Unless you think the status quo is an auhoritarian dystopia, which is just absurd.)

As for the point of the first amendment: that's a clearly overbroad interpretation, as any constitutional scholar will tell you.

Here's a question for everyone on that side of the debate: Why do you care so much more about the authority of parents than you do about kids learning what, by your own admission, you'd want your own kids to learn? And don't go telling me "Oh, well I just have my preferences and my experts and they have theirs." You know that you want your kids to lear evolution, for example, because you think that evoluation, while not guaranteed to be right, is that the best methods tell us is probably the case. Why allow the potential of children other than your own to be stymied by ignorant parents? This "you can do whatever you want with your own kids/I only care about kids learning the truth if they're MY kids" thing is a real fetishization of the parent-child relationship. What ever happened to "it takes a village..."?

-Young City
 

First off, I have to say this has been a fascinating discussion so far, with good points made on both sides (albeit some straw men rustling about, too).

The extremes as presented seem to be A) Government brainwashing children into a monocultural lockstep based on the views of arbitrarily-determined experts vs B) Ignorant parents insisting their and everyone else's children be taught various cockamamie things.

There's been much analysis of the rights of the parents and the rights of the government in the matter, but very little on the rights of the child. The goal of education isn't to produce a little copy the parents. The goal of education is (or bloody well should be) equipping the child with the information and reasoning skills to comprehend the world and function successfully in it. Things like creationism, afrocentrism, and my personal 'favorite' ebonics, just don't make the cut. And the people best qualified to determine where the cut is in the various educational fields are the experts in those fields. Yes, there's the chance they may be wrong, but absent the 100% certainty that we're never going to achieve, we have to play the odds.

That said, parents should have some say in what their children are taught. That 'say' is simply not exclusive. Creationist parents are free to teach their children creationism. They're not free to insist their children (let alone anyone else's) not be taught evolution. The children have the right to that information. They may still opt for creationism then or later, temporarily or permanently -- that's their choice, but at least it's an informed choice.
 

I definately agree that the strongest case for curricular standards comes from a "rights-of-the-child" approach, not a "rights-of-the-parent" approach. I suppose my main problem (other than the fact that no one's given a reason why kids have a "right to be educated properly" is that, while I'm certainly arrogant enough to be convinced that I know the answers and everyone else is wrong, I'm not quite arrogant enough to force others to accede to my views.

I agree that creationism and afrocentrism are absurd and false; but I consider libertarianism just as obviously and objectively correct as I consider ethnomathematics obviously and objectively false. Shall I insist that all schools teach libertarianism, and that all history courses, for instance, make it clear that the New Deal and the War on Poverty were abysmally stupid and wrongheaded? I don't think I'd get very far. I'm willing to leave other people and their kids alone if they'll leave me and my (hypothetical) kids alone.
 

anonymous at 10:37 wrote: "The goal of education is (or bloody well should be) equipping the child with the information and reasoning skills to comprehend the world and function successfully in it. Things like creationism, afrocentrism, and my personal 'favorite' ebonics, just don't make the cut. And the people best qualified to determine where the cut is in the various educational fields are the experts in those fields. Yes, there's the chance they may be wrong, but absent the 100% certainty that we're never going to achieve, we have to play the odds."

There's a tradeoff between an optimal solution and a robust solution when developing a model or system to operate in a chaotic environment, where optimal maximizes expectation and robustness minimizes the downside as the environment either changes or was misinterpreted in the first place. The optimal solution is very fragile and society needs robustness to survive for the long haul.

The overarching goal, in my opinion, is that children should be brought up to be part of a robust civilization. The way to do that, in my opinion, is to have lots of different parents teach (or have taught to) their children lots of different things. That increases the chance that some group or groups always gets things right enough to carry on. Admittedly, it also guarantees that some groups at any given time will do poorly, since they will end up being taught the wrong things. The diversity of upbringing both allows a more rapid search of the solution space and enables us to best play the odds to propagate civilization for the long term.
 

jadagul: I suppose my main problem (other than the fact that no one's given a reason why kids have a "right to be educated properly"

I would say there are two reasons. One, failing to educate a child properly is going to drastically limit his/her opportunities for success (with success here defined as, basically, a more comfortable and secure life, with greater satisfaction of personal interests). While there are some individuals who have risen above poor educational beginnings and others who cleave tightly to the idea that ignorance is bliss, they are very much the exception. The more poorly-educated you are, the more likely you are to live in poverty, with all the attendant deprivation and risk, and little to no awareness of how to change that situation.

Two, a properly-educated populace is better for society (this is why, despite being a libertarian, I count education as part of infrastructure). One thing failed and/or third-world societies the world over share is poor education. (And, yes, Cuba is included in that -- 100% literacy or no, I don't think I'm going out on much of a limb guessing the history and economics taught in Cuban schools are counter-factual.) A few people 'falling by the wayside' is tragic, but can be withstood. Larger portions of the populace wallowing in ignorance is a recipe for disaster.
 

bret: Shall I insist that all schools teach libertarianism, and that all history courses, for instance, make it clear that the New Deal and the War on Poverty were abysmally stupid and wrongheaded?

If you can persuade the experts of the obvious correctness of that point of view, insist away. If not, then work on persuading your children of its correctness. If your reasoning is so flimsy that you can't even convince your children, you might want to take a harder look at what you believe. (Note that I'm not saying you're wrong or stupid wrt the New Deal, etc., just that what's taught in public education needs to have a more robust justification than simply somebody really, really, really believes it).

The way to do that, in my opinion, is to have lots of different parents teach (or have taught to) their children lots of different things.

With the proviso that the 'have taught to' is not the province of public schools, it seems to me we agree here. If a parent feels strongly that his or her child needs to be taught something more or different than what that child is learning in school, then it falls to the parent to provide that teaching outside the school. If what's being taught is incorrect, the Darwinian sort of process you describe will largely weed it out.
 

you wrote a rhetorical question, asking Haven’t we all read about those studies of gang members who have high self esteem?

here's a non rhetorical answer. i for one have not seen those studies, and, would be glad to see you cite them (or one of them), because the trope of using gangs as an unexamined caricature of what undesirability is seems to be, well, a little racist, a little classist and more than a little besides the point.

lex
 

The purpose of this education is not to raise their self esteem. It is to stop young black kids from subconsciously believing that all black people are fundamentally subhuman.

This is a more rigorous and more insightful piece of writing on the subject.

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/African_Studies/Articles_Gen/afrocent_roth.html
 

History is not always a political issue. I teach a African American history class at the high school level, and my main concern is tell the student a more complete truth about american history. What you need to realize is that much of the progress in america has result from a ongoing stuggle of black people to define themselves in negative situations. Many times, real progess is a result of struggling with negative forces.