Colbeck's War on Social Studies

So, Colbeck's war on social studies is something I find infuriating, largely because districts, schools, and teachers, have to make value judgments in the material they elect to pass on to students and value judgments are a key part of political judgments.

Colbeck's not wrong to point that out and pull away the curtain.  I disagree with which way the needle swings and I'll get to that but if he just dropped the mic at the assertion that what kids are taught in schools over time can affect their political ideologies as adults and as such we need to be cautious as to preserve their right to choose what they would believe nobody would argue. 

But then I start reading about the things he actually doesn't like.

What Are Core (Democratic) Values

There are the rules and then there are the rules. What's more important than respecting a dead piece of paper, or even the system of is government it created is respecting the revolutionary ideas that it represented. Those ideas are the legacy of the founding fathers that we pass on to our posterity.

Those are core democratic values, the slow forward march against the rule of a dictator who could bar the doors of parliament and disband his country's legislature at whim. Those values did not start nor did they end with a single document least of all not one written by the United States but rather centuries of ongoing ever continuing debate about what constitutes the freedom, what constitutes power and the relation between the two and from where they derive.

And That is a civics class.



Or if you want to get fancy a political philosophy class.

Let's Talk About Equality


So Colbeck and to be fair much of the Republican party feels the government should not be responsible for equality of outcomes. I disagree but that is not the point. That is a larger and longer discussion. The point is that Colbeck is wary of the implications of the word equality and as a result wants to narrow the context of its use.

And I hate it.

When politicians argue over equality they are arguing over what seems to me to be implications of the ideal and this is no different. If we are all created equal does mean we should be all afforded by birth the same, rights, protections,  privileges, obligations and opportunities under the law. If that is the case we have a long way to go on that score. 

What does equality under the law actually mean?