Posted on 05/06/2023 4:45:28 AM PDT by george76
History is certainly not that detailed. While history may account for the structures your grandfather built, it certainly doesn’t contain day-to-day construction or contract details. We know Thomas Jefferson’s contribution to our Nation, but we don’t know his brand of toilet paper.
It makes you think out of the box a little bit and not linearly along the equation in front of you -
1/3 “of THIS thing” = 1/6 “of THAT other thing”.
I do think the triangle thing is just an ok example. My preferred example would use numbers.
I went to a ONE ROOM SCHOOL.
I treasure that education
At a third grade level I think it is good to say that 2/6 is equal to 1/3. And this can be easily shown with manipulatives. And then simplifying fractions as a numerical operation is an easy follow-on.
But young people who are just learning fractions, and who are too young to really handle abstract concepts, should NOT be taught that 1/6 is equal to 1/3. At that level, it is simply an incorrect statement. Sure, you can twist your head around and say, well, under the following circumstances, sure, I guess I can see why 1/6 might be equal to 1/3 ... But that sort of “clever” thinking isn’t a good way to introduce a fundamental concept to little kids.
I think that approach really leads into (and I think this is somewhat intentional) the thinking that “anything is true” is you just think about it the right way. Your Truth may not be My Truth, but both are true, because, hey, if you think about it the way I think about it, then I’m just right.
Certain people want that mentality to be endemic in society. And saying that 1/6 is equal to 1/3 is a step in that direction.
Great one. The young people are in for a great big surprise on May 11th when they see 300,000 job applicants wading across the Rio Grande. All those “student loans” they want the taxpayers to pay for will prove out to be a giant waste of other people’s money.
They may not know anything about American and World History but I’ll betcha they are whizzes in black history - much of which is fiction.
Massive political corruption—omitted from the biographies of all key players—is not a “detail”.
It is central and critical to understand who they were, what motivated them and their (lack of) moral values.
If that is not valid “history” nothing is.
If it is Illinois or Italy there is no reason to dwell on it—just as we know that aspiring rappers are gonna rap—but I agree that high and mighty sons of Puritans need taking down a peg or two.
They need Deliverance.
Voting means nothing if the corrupt politicians can successfully hide their dirty deeds.
There can be no informed consent in such an environment.
They aren’t taught
Not for awhile
0
The beauty of the places I note is that there was no need to hide dirty deeds, and no pretense of doing so. Illinois gave us the wonderful definition of an honest politician: an honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought.
OK. We don’t know anything at all.
"Polish children need only to be educated enough to read and write a simple letter, count to 500 and, above all, to obey their German masters."
- Heinrich Himmler, 1940
There is nothing new under the sun.
At school we “know” a lot—the problem is that a large chunk of it is false.
My Ph.D. is in Economic History (Cliometrics). If you want to know anything about the internal rate of return on Parliamentary Land Enclosures in 18th Century England, I’m your man!
I do not believe in study questions. The frat/sorority houses will already have a file on you...they don’t need any more help. I believe any crutch offered to a student is almost always unnecessary.
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