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Whose Politics Deserve To Be Educational?
There’s a common story that’s usually told among my friends and my generation about studying history in K-12. The teacher tells a long story about an important set of moments in time about this country, usually layered with facts about the moments. The teacher gives us their interpretation of the moments in that time. They usually have it on good authority that these are the right stories to tell because the textbook says so. Whether brand new or withered at the edges, this book has the best version of the story that needs to be told to millions of children at the time. The textbook’s presence in the classrooms reifies the idea that every student has either been told the same story or may have been told another story so this is the one we need to pass the assessment that will hopefully let us learn more stories. We confuse the true stories with the common stories, but that’s irrelevant.
The more curious among us might have sifted through the rest of the textbook we never get to. This story only seems to make sense because we trust the adult, we trust the textbook, and/or we need this story to work so we can move on.
The time we’re in now suggests that we’re clashing with the story that’s been told for so long. We’re in a time when we’ve had to rethink education from multiple levers, forced by at least five separate and potent crises:
