Oklahoman legislators REALLY think America is the best. So much so that they don’t want their kids being taught AP History if they’re going to include all that negative stuff in our history like slavery and sadness. So the government is passing a measure to stop state funding from being used to teach AP History classes:
[Rep. Dan] Fisher, [who introduced House bill 1380] who has been active in a church-and-state organization called the Black Robe Regiment, said the AP U.S. history course framework emphasizes “what is bad about America.”… and said the framework omits the concept of “American exceptionalism.”
Because why would you want to give future generations a full story or a leg up when it comes to college?
Team Blackness also discussed the failings of FitBit, how the Peanuts comic strip got its first black character, and a graphic design company that got in big trouble social media trouble for using noose imagery to sell its product.
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TR
This is just what kids in Oklahoma needed — another bit of baggage that’ll keep them from getting into a good college anywhere out of state.
Mike in NC
The Black Robe Regiment: fascism wrapped in the Confederate flag and thumping a Bible, just like the Baby Jesus wanted it.
Belafon
@TR: Why would you ever want to leave your
tribehome state?piratedan
willfully stupid comes to mind… then again, I went to school, so perhaps those folks in Oklahoma that are supporting this might have an issue with the word willfully.
Bobby B.
Black Robe Regiment? Sounds like he’s consciously setting up a quasi/semi/pseudo-paramilitary organization. Which he learned about by playing videogames.
boatboy_srq
@TR: Any chance this is an attempt to halt “brain drain” as the smartest kids go somewhere other than Dumbfvckistan to live and work? Oh, right…
I did love Rep. Brat’s (talk about appropriate names for Teahadi congresscritters) comment about Socrates trained Plato on a rock…” True – but Socrates wasn’t teaching Plato particle physics (or even teaching him the prerequisites to learn particle physics). That the same people who bash philosophy (and the other Humanities) as liberal fascososhulistic indoctrination point to one of the great philosophers (that their constituents’ kids would learn nothing about if they had their way) as a defense is just priceless.
sharl
I left the following in the comments to the previous post. While not on-topic here, I’m sure it is of general interest to the TWiB folks. Also, there is probably nothing new there to the TWiB crew, other than maybe Spencer Ackerman and his colleagues at The Guardian using their resources to gather up a bunch of witnesses and documents and put it all in one place.
ETA: This appears to be Part 2:
boatboy_srq
@piratedan: I think we’re a generation removed from “I done went to skul, and I didn’t larn nuffin’, so skul’s a waste o’ taxpayin’ people’s munny and we ain’t gonna pay fer it no moah.” Ahmurrca fvck yeah. There are days I miss the Cold War: at least back then the Reichwing would admit that Xtians might go to Heaven but it took scientists to get to the moon.
gene108
@boatboy_srq:
At this point in time the truly rich really do not care about America as a country per se, other than they happen to be here by an accident of birth.
If they could take their money to a more business friendly environment they would and leave the rest of us with the nut-jobs.
rollSound
Colleges should be announcing that such courses are invalid for credit. Just like any HS diploma based on Texas-approved larnin’.
Tokyokie
@Bobby B.: Well, there was already a white-robed regiment with much the same agenda.
@rollSound: Students would still have to pass the test administered by the College Board. And if these students have been taught that James Madison wanted to establish Southern Baptism as the national religion, they probably won’t.
lethargytartare
@gene108:
they already have
TR
@boatboy_srq:
If so, they’re voting against their own future. If the smarter people can no longer leave Oklahoma, the GOP is going to have a tougher time at the polls.
PurpleGirl
Isn’t the Black Robe Regiment that group started by David Barton and pitched by Glenn Beck? (I know that it claims Barton isn’t affiliated with it but I remember Beck talking about Barton and the Black Robe Regiment.)
KG
A powerful (though not necessarily wise) man once said that history is the story as told by the victor. I wonder if some part of the conservative nihilists’ attack on history has to do with a slow recognition that it’s not entirely their story and what that might possibly mean
boatboy_srq
@TR: Exactly. Hence the “Oh, right…” following the question.
PurpleGirl
@Tokyokie:
…James Madison wanted to establish Southern Baptism as the national religion, they probably won’t.
Funny thing though, there wasn’t a Southern Baptist sect during Madison’s time. There were just Baptists. Southern Baptists didn’t appear until the 1840s when the slavery/abolition issue caused a schism among the Baptists.
jl
@boatboy_srq:
‘ I did love Rep. Brat’s (talk about appropriate names for Teahadi congresscritters) comment about Socrates trained Plato on a rock…” ‘
Brat and his buddies are welcome to go to a doc or dentist or survive a nurse trained on that principle.
Ironic too, since I am sure Brat and his teabagger friends would just love them some Socrates… either what might have been the real one, or Plato’s semi-fictional rhetorical device. Though probably real Socrates had the appearance of wandering around harassing normal people at random with complete BS, which has something in common with teabagger activity. If the real Socrates was 50=50 BS, that would be OK. Still far away enough away from 95%-5% of teabaggers, and that 5% they don’t really mean anyway.
The Moar You Know
My wife and I have been talking, and have figured out that the one surefire way to get Americans back supporting teachers (the ones who will be left, who won’t be many) and schools is to close all the public schools and start charging a lot of money for private education.
Americans respect things that cost a lot and things they can’t afford, and not much else.
They sure as shit don’t respect education, and I could very easily turn this into a “both sides do it” post by giving you a laundry list of fucktarded educational policy that’s far more destructive than Oklahoma’s hissy fit being shoved out/onto to the public by so-called liberals.
jl
@PurpleGirl: Madison, Adams and Jefferson had Presbyterians and sundry Calvinist scum to fear and loath.
ruemara
@KG: They seem to have won the Cold Civil War.
Another Holocene Human
FYWP didn’t double post today? Omg!
Oh, and popping in once again to assert that Oklahoma is NOT okay.
It also has a racist history second to none, from the forced march/genocide that pushed Indians from as far away as Georgia into the territory, to the further encroachment and theft through the allotment system and the principle of “you got sumthin’ n’ I want it”, and then just think about the implications of being surrounded by TX, KS, and MO and that legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, bigotry, and violence, and now, put it in the pot and slow simmer for forty years of oil and industry drying up and blowing away while the dry rump remaining gets more and more bitter, paranoid, and Jesus-y. The whites there were heavily Southern Baptist, which tells you all you need to know about where they migrated from. Oklahoma is a horrible, horrible, horrible place. The only good to come out of that state* was Will Rogers and Elizabeth Warren. One got as fast and far out of OK as she could and the other is deceased.
*consider the fact that Orange County, CA collectively also came out of that state. ugh.
OK is there to make the GOP in Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska pat themselves on the back for being moderate champions of good government. (Of course KS screwed that up, not that OK will learn.) OK, like all little dogs, mistakenly thinks the biggest dog around is their rival, so sort of like Boston’s obsession with New York, Oklahomans are always ragging on Texans while Texas kind of forgets they’re there. They try to emulate TX all day long on things like spending the school textbook budget on football gear and executing the cognitively impaired. Of course they could never match TX or LA’s murder rate because they’re too midwestern, and despite their best efforts they’ve never beaten MS and AL on sucking on development measures. Oh well, maybe next year.
tesslibrarian
Georgia’s doing the same dumb shit as Oklahoma, too.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I like my FitBit and rarely have any issues with it. I suspect a lot of people forget to take the necessary step of telling it what your stride length is, so they get bad results. But I guess I’ll have to try and listen when I get home to find out.
Another Holocene Human
Elon, wow, I skimmed your article too quickly. They’re defunding AP history?! Wow, this is good.
Oklahoma has never taught about Oklahoma’s horrific history to begin with. Now they’re latching on AP because it’s the first time some of the students see this stuff since it’s a national test and you might want to take it to get into a good school? Too fucking rich!! And kind of horrifying because I can’t think of a time that these 3rd party college prep exams have been targeted before. (Technically they’re targeting the class not the exam.) Screaming about Common Core wasn’t enough, then.
What will the company do to fight back? Have they not spread the bribes around sufficiently?
Is this news to Oklahomans because they used to take ACT and forget about the other tests but AP has started to supplant that?
Black Robe Regiment sounds like some serious fascist 5th columnist shit to me.
Another Holocene Human
@tesslibrarian: Hmm, they are communing with the same hive mind again.
Blackmail to get College Board to join ALEC?
Another Holocene Human
@tesslibrarian: Wow, that was a great article although it would have been nice if the blockquotes had been set off in the formatting somehow, an indent or something. I’m astounded to see sanity coming from a print media source. Maybe there are enough moderates in metro ATL that someone is listening. She did throw shade on the guy calling him “coastal”.
Sloegin
Musta got oil on their white robes.
Another Holocene Human
@boatboy_srq: Socrates actually got into some trouble for dabbling around in investigating physics as anything other than a thought experiment. It was considered blasphemous… Aristophanes satirized him for this, which Socrates claimed was a youthful phase. (For all his offending the gods he later got executed on political charges.)
You need more than a rock to teach geometry but since Plato was the tutor to kings and tyrants and shit why would you worry about math? I’m just saying, never heard of him having a mathematical knack for anything. Lots of Greek lights have proofs to their name but not him. Plato had lots of thoughts about sexual dimorphism, though. Just ask him.
(Pile on, haters. I will despise Plato to my grave.)
jl
Story at TPM blog about some details of the alternative to AP. One item the conservatives proposed including but then dropped was Mecklenburg Declaration, which gives you an idea of the very important stuff that was left out of the AP curriculum.
Alternative proposal still has works by King and Malcolm X, but who knows what the conservatives plan to teach about them.
Main thing I noticed was penny-ante partisan BS component: important to have speeches by St. Reagan and Bush II in there!
Anti-AP History GOPer Wanted To Teach Widely Disputed Document
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/oklahoma-ap-history-mecklenburg
Another Holocene Human
@jl: In my favorite Socrates dialogue (which asks whether morality comes from the gods) the dude Socrates is annoying THINKS Socrates is full of BS and only realizes too late that Socrates is calling him (and society) on his BS.
Socratic method is a finely honed weapon for a world where certain kinds of thoughts and notions were socially unacceptable. Socrates avoids saying anything heretical or punishable … reminds me of Malcolm X doing his cassandra dance about what’s gonna happen or how people are going to react without actually calling for the revolution himself.
Mike J
@Another Holocene Human:
Anti-immigration people from The Sooner State always amuse me. The state was built by undocumented immigrants.
As for your argument about good Oklahomans, I’d guess Soonergrunt knows at least a few.
jl
@Another Holocene Human: Actually, from what I read, they needed a sandbox and some sticks to teach math back then. Brat too tight to spring for those? Maybe later wax tablets, but not sure they had those until Rome. Brat probably thinks those would be pretty luxe for these damns kids today.
I never heard that doing experiments was considered blasphemous. I know they did astronomical observations. Brat gonna spring for that? Stonehenge was probably a big ticket item back in the day, you know? Not sure the Greeks splurged like that. They must of had some temples or walls with notches in them or something.
Well, ignorance is bliss and I am glad that Brat and his dupes feel all happy and smart about it.
Mike J
@Mnemosyne (iPhone):
My issue is that the company owns my data and I can’t get to it without their permission.
I would like to have the option of uploading to their website if I want the pretty graphs, but being able to keep the data on my own computer and manipulate it as I see fit is non-negotiable.
The fact that they “give” you access to minimal data and charge you for a larger subset (but still not all) of it doesn’t make it ok to deny users information about themselves.
delk
Meanwhile Oklahoma bigot Sally Kern wants to fire officials that issue gay marriage licenses.
Splitting Image
@Another Holocene Human:
James Garner was also from Oklahoma. He was a good’un. So was Woody Guthrie.
Also Blake Edwards.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Mike J:
You can get that same data by wearing a “dumb” pedometer on your hip and doing all of the calculations yourself. Have at it. I actually don’t care one way or the other who knows how many staircases I walked up on a particular day. What good does that data do anyone other than myself?
Mike J
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): It’s irrelevant what good the data does them. The data is mine, not theirs. Why should I have to pay them for a limited subset of the data they have? If it has no value, why wouldn’t they allow users to keep it?
Re the pedometer, it won’t give you the granularity. the best thing I’ve found is an older ipod with a pedometer built in. It also attempts to phone home and hide your data from you, but happily it stores its data in easy to parse XML files. I’d like to use some of the other features of the fitbit, but not having control of data is a deal breaker.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Mike J:
I’m still not sure what “granularity” you get from the iPod that you can’t get from an analog pedometer and keeping a good journal.
boatboy_srq
@jl:
Perhaps the most effective response to the Teahad: give them the expertise their education budgets and philosophical constraints demand.
tesslibrarian
@Another Holocene Human: Maureen Downey has written for the AJC for ages; I recall when her twins were born–she was on the editorial board at the time, wrote for the Op-Ed pages. Her husband also worked for them then as a Metro reporter.
You’ll note that she now is writing a blog. I don’t know if her article made it into the printed version of the paper. Layout on the AJC’s site has always been terrible, even before they started putting articles behind the pay wall. Sometimes I think they want to fold.
The short-sightedness of our current legislature is disappointing. When my husband changed jobs last year, one of his offers was from a French company that wanted him in the US, but would be willing to pay to move us to France if that’s what he preferred. If we had kids, that probably would have been the job he took, since “Georgia grown, Georgia owned” is not really a selling point for education.
MomSense
We are rapidly becoming too stupid to exist. Anyone else feeling sick of being held back, catastrophically so in the case of climate change, by all the people who revel in being ignorant? What the hell do we do about it?
Another Holocene Human
@tesslibrarian: It brings to mind “P-cans, P-nuts, Peaches”.
Another Holocene Human
@Splitting Image: Okay, Woody Guthrie, good call.
Another Holocene Human
@jl: Yes, exactly, sandbox and sticks. Like Archimedes. Observing and calculating was fine, but Socrates in his younger days was accused of doing physics experiments. Galen did a lot of observing and probably some science-like stuff with medicine but he managed to wrap himself in the cloak of religion (so effectively that later generations considered him a demigod). Thought experiments were fine, as anyone subjected to Aristotle’s physics theories can attest.
I thought Aristophanes called out Socrates in “The Frogs” but I could be misremembering. It’s been a while.
Another Holocene Human
@jl: Athens spent a lot on a golden mega temple but had to melt down their golden god when they went to war with their neighbors for the umpteenth time.
Tokyokie
@PurpleGirl: Like these people are interested in historical facts.
ruemara
@MomSense: I, myself, am a big fan of tossing them into the ocean. However, I’ve been told this is possibly antisocial.
Tokyokie
@Another Holocene Human: Oklahoma’s initial white residents tended to be from the states closest by, so a lot of Kansas wheat farmers in the north (especially west of Stillwater), a lot of Texas cattlemen along the Red River, and a lot of racist trash from Arkansas on the west side of the Ozark Plateau (essentially the eastern third of the state). The southeastern part of the state (which produced Watergate-era House Speaker Carl Albert) is still called Little Dixie. And the part of the state closest to Arkansas was long a haven for criminals during the late 19th century, because federal law enforcement (administered from Fort Smith) was ineffective, and local law enforcment didn’t exist. (That’s kind of the starting point for True Grit, although the Coen brothers’ version looks more like the Cookson Hills than the one with John Wayne.)
Anyway, way back when I was in 9th grade, I was required to take Oklahoma history. It was probably in that class that it occurred to me that the “Sooners,” so called because they left the land-run starting line before they were supposed to, did so to get the best farmland, the land with a spring or a creek that flowed year-round. Because they had the best land, they probably were the most successful farmers and became pillars of their communities. So even ignoring the fact that the territory opened in the runs (and my grandfather participated in the Cherokee Strip run of 1889) was land given then taken away from Native Americans, the state of Oklahoma was founded on corruption.
But if you’re interested in the state’s horrible history, read up on the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which the Klan basically went in and burned down the wealthiest black community in America (it still stood as the deadliest race riot in U.S. history until midway through the wave of riots in the 1960s), or the Osage Reign of Terror, in which white men married Osage women and then began systematically killing off all the in-laws so that the wife would inherit all their head rights, at which point, she’d be murdered as well. Because never mind that the tribe had title to the land, they didn’t deserve the riches the land held (i.e., the second largest oil inland reservoir in the lower 48 states) if white folks wanted it.
And somehow, I’m guessing the folks who are pushing this legislation will leave all that out of the curriculum.
RSA
It’s a dumb move by the OK legislature, but to me the reading list doesn’t seem too bad. There’s Reagan overkill, but the GWB speech was on 9/11, and they include the poem “The New Colossus”; Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech; speeches from Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X; Johnson on the Great Society; … They’re kinda light on the Civil War, and there’s some strange stuff, but it’s not as bad as you might imagine. Of course, I’m not a historian and I might be completely off.
http://webserver1.lsb.state.ok.us/cf_pdf/2015-16%20FLR/HFLR/HB1380%20HFLR.PDF
TR
@RSA:
Interesting list, thanks for the link. I am an historian, and it’s not as bad as I’d assumed either.
Still, it’s full of weird bits — they list the “national motto” (adopted in 1956) and the “national anthem” (written in 1814, but not adopted until 1931) in a long string of colonial/revolutionary documents, implying they were there from the start.
More problematically, it’s always the happy spin on events. If you’re going to look at Little Rock, Eisenhower’s ineffectual speech (after his ineffectual actions) is bizarre. King has the Birmingham letter and I Have a Dream, but not his more powerful criticisms of his post-1963 career.
And some odd conservative angles: Booker T. Washington, but no DuBois? Kennan on the nature of the Soviet menace? Reagan’s 40th anniversary DDay speech *and* the Brandenburg Gate nonsense?
Lots of flaws still. There’s a reason they leave the APUSH content to actual historians.