Posted on 06/29/2018 6:44:16 AM PDT by C19fan
Without question.
Will that?
I can envision their knowledge marginalized and considered irrevelent, no matter how true it might be.
Like we have discussed, 4000 years ago is the outer limit of history. Anything before that is not history, and belongs in anthropology, mythology and/or other fields of study.
The truth is, kids learn US history in elementary school (well, uh, that is, they used to), and by the time they reach social studies (which is a stupid name that needs to be retired) they're also starting to feel those pesky hormones, and couldn't possibly care less about ancient history. My mother recalled having complained about ancient history from her high school years in the 1940s.
I don't think I was taught anything about ancient history, I think the social studies pretty much started with the mid-15th century Age of Sail, Columbus' voyages starting in 1492, then various efforts to establish independence by Latin America, then a bit of 20th century (WWI, WWII); by high school social studies had become political science and Watergate was still fresh in memory, while Vietnam had receded (I was of just the right age that I never wound up having to register for the draft).
p
when are we going to take back control of the textbooks, anyway??
I have heard that most textbooks in the country are produced in Texas and influenced by Texas board(s) of education. Some may think this is a good thing, others may not.
If I understand correctly, AP means Advanced Placement. If so then it is oriented to the brightest kids who are college bound, it should be more complex.
This is a good move. Actual history needs to be separated from other fields of study. Tired of blurring the lines with academic fantasy.
If the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and humans have only been around for a few hundred thousand years, how do we know there have not been many more civilizations and species before us?
The Universe is 13.7B years old. The Earth has not existed since the moment the Universe was created and is about 4.5B years old and is made out the debris of two previous generation of stars.
Life on Earth started shortly after the temperatures cooled down, about 3.7B years ago. Up until 600M years ago, life was predominantly single-celled organisms. From 600M years until now, the variety of life that we see evolved.
Humans started to separate from the rest of the great apes about 7M years ago and we became modern humans 200k years ago.
Life has immense complexity and we don't see species arising multiple times. It's just incredibly unlikely. Like a 10−500 chance -- like winning the lottery 100 times in a row. This would never happen even if there was an Earth-like planet around every star in the Universe, with the entire population of human-like creatures playing the lottery once every second for the entire age of the Universe (past and present).
But there is a very reasonable question about how much we know about the period of time in between when life formed and 600M years ago. Could there have been multiple cycles of complex life that then collapsed back down to single cell life? After all, that's 3B years, 5 times longer than this last period when we went from single celled organisms to us (evolving trees, fish, flowers, multiple epochs of dinosaurs, mammals and yes, humans). From my reading, we have pretty strong evidence against this. The evidence is in chemical traces of life that we use to infer the existence of old life. If there had been vast boom-bust cycles we would see more variety in these chemical markers for life both varying in locations around the globe and also in the depth (which is a proxy for time).
When you start thinking about what needs to be done to take a hot rock that's a lot like a global volcano and turn it into the pristine environment that we see, you realize that it takes a lot of time. The atmosphere and oceans were toxic to modern multicellular life and early life had to separate out all the nasty chemicals. This took a lot of time. Even so, it certainly seems like life took its sweet time and then got in a huge hurry over the past 600M years.
Heaven forbid kids get a Classical education and realize that bureaucrats did in the Roman Empire.
Have you cracked open a publik skrewl textbook lately?
They suck.
Pearson high school history textbook teaches Trump is mentally ill and his supporters are racists
Started re-reading Suetonius “Twelve Caesars”, first section about Julius... and six or 7 pages into it, “hey,same politics, almost same governmental core structure, same conniving thieving, corrupt, degenerate pols as today” As the Sage Yogi Berra said, “Deja vu all over again.”
In my era, elementary school American history was essentially a thumbnail view of key persons and significant events. More detailed American History was a 7th grade course; Social Studies was a re-labeled Civics course; Ancient and Medieval history, once required for college prep track became an elective; Modern European History, IIRC, was an elective.
Back in the early 1980s the partisan cry was that Texas, being the single largest *market* for textbooks (because the state had a uniform curriculum and/or the state bought enough for every school to get the best price), and of course because the left was screaming that Reagan was President and somehow behind everything that was racist, including Holocaust denial, that the textbook publishers made sure they could sell their books to the Texans..
He said millennium, not century. ;-)
Is there any way she could take it as a straight college credit in high school? It is cheaper and she has a pretty much guaranteed 3 hrs. college credit as opposed to AP where she has to jump through hoops to pass the test. Too many times the high school teacher doesn’t teach the class toward the AP test so kids fail the test. Both avenues should give the same extra points for her high school GPA. Always go with the college credit first. Then AP. Last, regular high school class.
BC or AD for me, too. Can’t stand CE.
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