When was America Great?

[pErvinalia]

We invented the Hill's Hoist!

[laklak]

The Nation of Immigrants thing.

Nobody beats 'Murika in Nationalism, we're the best! Fuk Yeah!

[Sean Hayden]

[JimC]

That's the whole point of the country.

Similar to Oz.

What is? Nationalism?

Not a particularly good point.

I think Lak meant immigration/melting pot and lots of non-anglo names...

[Tero]

August 6th 1945. Kings of the planet.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Florida under DeSantis is rewriting American history for schools. Of course it's blatantly mendacious revisionism meant to show that America was great and will always be great. A model for Republican-controlled states, hurrah.

'Florida’s new history course whitewashes the founders on slavery'

Florida has long been a laboratory for autocracy. Several of the Trump administration’s most extreme policies were piloted there, including aggressive immigration enforcement, the systematic rollback of civil rights and voter suppression.

Now the Sunshine State is offering a new experiment: a high school history course offering a conservative interpretation of American history and a corrective to the official Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum, which more than half a million students took last year, and that most historians and educators consider to be ideologically well-balanced. Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s education department have attacked the AP course as “woke” and unpatriotic because it examines the complexities of American history including White on Black chattel slavery, the genocide of First Nations peoples and other realities that puncture sacred civic myths such as American exceptionalism and the fantasy that America is, and has always been, the greatest country in the world.

The scope of Florida’s latest right-wing project is ambitious, and part of a three-year campaign, according to a recent report by Dana Goldstein of the New York Times. The course, she revealed, “focuses on the Protestant faith of the Founders, argues that the U.S. Constitution is an antislavery document and recommends a textbook written explicitly to build patriotism.” The story quotes Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, as praising the new curriculum’s use of primary sources. But even he acknowledged that the new course leans not on criticism but explicitly on how America is a “good, special place.”

This is a polite way of saying that the curriculum is nothing more than right-wing propaganda.

The American right has long targeted classrooms as political spaces where the country’s future can be won by socializing and indoctrinating young people into simplistic notions of “patriotism” and “nationalism,” rather than compelling them to ask hard questions about our history, which can encourage them to be responsible citizens who are intellectually and psychologically equipped to challenge the powerful.

The impact of Florida’s changes will be felt far beyond its borders. As Goldstein reported, the state has often set the pace for Republican education policy in the Trump era. Other red states will likely administer the new course, along with others in the program of accelerated courses the state has dubbed FACT (Florida Advanced Courses and Tests), which will be, she wrote, “a sort of red-state competitor to the College Board,” which oversees the AP curricula.

Most of the new history course reflects a boilerplate conservative view of American history and society, where cheerleading too frequently substitutes for rigor and accuracy. But it also claims that the Constitution is an antislavery document — and that the nation’s founders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who both owned enslaved people, were opposed to the institution. Such pronouncements are not merely wrong. They are insidious.

...

Florida’s history education program is not an outlier. It is a smaller version of the Trump administration’s white racial authoritarian project masquerading as patriotism and American exceptionalism.

[...]

Anybody heard from laklak? It's been nearly a year since he last logged on.

[Brian Peacock]

Pupils will still be getting a good general, historically-balanced education at posh school I guess. I wonder if American's realise how ghoulish this policy appears to outsiders?

They'll be making the kids wear little brown uniforms next.

[Tero]

1950

They had stuff. We in Finland had a pocket knife or puukko (over 10 age). With that we made everything.

[pErvinalia]

Lak is still active on Facebook.

[macdoc]

FB is fucking flypaper .....many decent forums have been gutted and I've found myself sucked in as I need the marketplace and find friends but still hate the fucking thing.