I thought that both the podcast and reading were very interesting and they left me with a lot of thoughts. I find it wild how much the collection and recording of history have changed in the past, especially in the past few decades alone with so many technological advances. Just the other day I saw a post about how historical archivists have already collected and saved many items that relate to the COVID-19 pandemic. This has lead me to question that with so many current historical records, will the past be overshadowed by the present? In some ways, I think that it already has, which is unfortunate because there are so many stories that will be forgotten or that we will never get to hear. Still, even with so many current ways to record things, facts and events continue to get misconstrued.<\/p>\n
Part of the reason that I see for the misconstruction of history is because of oversimplification and convenience. I think that the American education system is severely flawed and leaves out or gets wrong a lot of things, but a lot of it has been done because it is the easier way. For one thing, it is nearly impossible to teach everything in school. While it is true that Rosa Parks was not the first to give up her seat, or that MLK Jr. was not solely responsible for leading the Civil Rights Movement, it is a lot easier to tell elementary and middle school students that. Discussing the other factors of those events takes time, and would necessitate covering other complex topics in order to gain a full understanding. This is not to say that we need to leave in things like telling students that Christopher Columbus was a great guy or that George Washington was a perfect man, but I find it unrealistic to expect people to learn the full history and stories from all of the past. Of course, no one is saying that we need to learn everything, but I think it makes the debate about fixing our education system very complicated. I think a good start to creating positive change in education would be to look at who is writing our history books. At the end of the Civil War, the United Daughters of the Confederacy wrote their skewed perspective of history in textbooks that have continued to have a lasting impact on the education of students in southern states. Textbooks need to be written by diverse groups of people, not just the historical white and rich people of the past. With all this said, education is still a luxury and privilege that not all have, and there is always more to learn. You can’t learn everything, but you can do your best to learn the truth.<\/p>\n
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I thought that both the podcast and reading were very interesting and they left me with a lot of thoughts. I find it wild how much the collection and recording of history have changed in the past, especially in the past few decades alone with so many technological advances. Just the other day I saw […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4742,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4742"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7102,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7099\/revisions\/7102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}