site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

13
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Why not? If people are interested, then I think these courses should be offered as electives.

Think you are forgetting the amount of education of a high school grad even one going to an elite school.

Africans just haven’t figured into the big world events that high school kids don’t know. They’ve had zero influence on major ideologies, political systems, communism versus capitalism etc. The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.

The former I think high school kids need training in bigger things or the latter is just woke training.

This is rather silly. History education is not just teaching about the 'objectively' most important things in the world, otherwise British schools wildly under-study Asia and over-study British history, or at any rate certainly pre-Industrial revolution British history. Clearly, race and slavery has been enormously significant in American history, being possibly the biggest running issue in American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and certainly for a few decades before the Civil War, and of course being the cause of the Civil War itself.

The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.

It's so blindingly obvious you have almost no history education. Yeah, soul food and rap music is the sum total of the impact of race and African-Americans in American history.

It would be better for students spending an entire year reading (1) Paine, (2) Declaration, (3) Articles of Confederation, (4) federalist papers, (5) anti-federalist papers, (5) constitution, (6) Jefferson and Adam’s correspondences, and (7) key early cases (eg Marbury, Gibbons). That provides a much more detailed American history background compared to…AA history.

It's an elective. They will be taking this course in addition to a US History survey course, not instead.

Scarcity is a thing. Doing this means doing less of other things including an in depth review of more important American history.

My guess is a lot of the things I list are covered only in a cursory manner. Do high school students read all the federalist papers? Do they know there are anti federalist papers? Do they understand the importance of the constitution in relation to foreign bond holders?

Scarcity is indeed a thing, but no student will ever get a complete and in depth understanding of every period of American history, that's just not realistic. So there are going to have to be some somewhat arbitrary decisions on what to cover and what not to cover, elective classes just means students are choosing what they cover in depth, which is fine.

Well my point is it makes sense in scarcity to prioritize the important items.

What I'm saying is that there isn't really such thing as 'objective' importance in history. Is the high politics of the early republic more or less important than, say, the experience of small farmers or urban workers or slaves in the same period? Who is 'objectively' worth more class time, Roosevelt or Wilson? Washington or Lincoln? There are no correct answers to these questions, it's just preference really.

More comments