Blog entries tagged civics

Texas textbooks rewrite history

Trainee — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 12:35:53 +0100

Source: The Depaulia; 9 June, 2010

Changes to Texas textbooks have caused outrage across the country. On May 21, the 15-member Texas Board of Education voted 9-5 to pass new standards that apply to all civics classes. The board argued that the teachers that wrote the curriculum were too liberally biased and believe the corrections they made to include Republican political philosophies and the portrayal of conservatives in a more positive light.

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The Big Idea -- it's bad education policy

Trainee — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 09:25:41 +0100

Source: Los Angeles Times; March 16th, 2010

There have been two features that regularly mark the history of U.S. public schools. Over the last century, our education system has been regularly captivated by a Big Idea -- a savant or an organization that promised a simple solution to the problems of our schools. The second is that there are no simple solutions, no miracle cures to those problems. Education is a slow, arduous process that requires the work of willing students, dedicatRead More...

Learning about history? Fuggedaboudit!

Trainee — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:59:52 +0100

Source: Technician; March 10th 2010

For those of you who follow the news or detest history classes, recent events regarding the instruction of history in elementary through high school may have caught your attention. And if you hated history classes, then you suddenly wish the news surrounding the reform of North Carolina’s history curriculum happened before you had to sit through those dry, boring lectures about the Federalists, Whigs and the Missouri Compromise.
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Saving living history

Trainee — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:27:26 +0100

Source: The Globe and Mail; March 9th 2010

Canada's last First World War veteran, John Babcock, has died and as the ranks of Second World War veterans dwindle, there's an absence of living history that threatens to weaken our civic identity. So it is a shame that a hands-on, unique program that brings historical wartime records alive to a younger generation is slated to be replaced by a small selection of digital files.

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State of North Carolina likely to revisit proposed high school history curriculum changes

Trainee — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:29:59 +0100

Source: Citizen-Times, March 8th 2010

ASHEVILLE — Debbie Goodwin with Buncombe County Schools once heard a Raleigh teacher compare teaching high school U.S. history to taking a bus down the interstate. There's very little time to stop and look around. “We joke that history only gets longer, and the semester gets shorter,” said Goodwin.But a proposal to split the teaching of U.S. history between high school and the elementary and middle school grades — in aRead More...