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[MetalSlimeHunt]

America has plenty of real historians, like Howard Zinn. We just need to start listening to them.

[MrRoboto75]

America has plenty of real historians, like Howard Zinn. We just need to start listening to them.

Listen to an expert?  Not the true American way.

[Max™]

Sounds like someone lookin' a little bit red, you a commie now, MSH? We need to report you to the authorities?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

My first draft was to say that only Marxist historiographers should be legally allowed to publish history textbooks, but I wanted to reach out to our reasonable rational patriotic moderate allies across the isle by citing Zinn.

[MrRoboto75]

My first draft was to say that only Marxist historiographers should be legally allowed to publish history textbooks, but I wanted to reach out to our reasonable rational patriotic moderate allies across the isle by citing Zinn.

something something civil war something something state's rights

[misko27]

The cops are sick in my city, what authorities? The crime rates down because even the criminals are sticking indoors. I live in a city under siege!

Only thing that blows my mind is people don't realize their states are next. Remember when that Italian minister pleaded with Europe to take advantage of Italian sacrifices, said "Today Italy is the red zone; in a month it will be all of Europe"? Funnily enough the only wrong thing about that statement was it took less than a month.

At the time he said that there were dozens of cases in the other countries of Europe! There are hundreds, and in 16, thousands, in the states!

[Trekkin]

What really needs to happen, is both states need their hands out of that cookie jar, and an academic consortium with international members needs to define what's in the books- Say, you need to have a good impact score and have contributed to human knowledge in a meaningful capacity to contribute to the curriculum.  People that are going to be harder to buy off for "Jesus want this!!!" reasons.

Leaving aside the problems already mentioned, and the serious obstacles to actually getting a consensus definition of "good" and "meaningful", there's one fatal obstacle to this plan: the spam folders of the academics you want are already inundated with requests of this type, because the people who want better textbooks can't offer anything more valuable to us than the time we'd waste on something like this. Grants are an intrinsically better source of funding, salary's what patents and industrial collaborations are for, and all the people whose opinions we actually care about already read our actual work because they have journal access. If it were some sort of legal requirement, we'd just leave while everyone was working out the problems with preventing us filling the books with amusing nonsense out of spite; we've certainly no shortage of places to go, and while America is a beautifully over-funded and under-regulated playground, it is not unique in either respect. In any event, the education system is working well enough for our purposes. We're oversupplied with brilliant obsessives and will be for the foreseeable future.

See, we're very hard to buy off for "Jesus want this" reasons, and by the same token we're very hard to buy off for "I, John Q. Lay-Public, want this" reasons. You're only going to get authors with no future and nothing better to do, and I'm guessing you don't want humanities textbooks exclusively.

[wierd]

That's fair enough--

Probably the best that can be done then, is to set strict regulatory requirements on what gets included and why-- but regulatory capture will always be a thing.

As long as academia is uninterested in quality educational materials, it will just be a non-starter.

[martinuzz]

In response to the bounty on his head, Maduro adressed Trump in a tv speech.
He calls Trump 'a racist cowboy', and warns that his country is ready to go to war if the US and Colombia dare attack Venezuela.
Furthermore, he calls Trump 'a terrible person that plays international relations like the extortion artist from the New York maffia he was back when he was a real estate mogul'.
"when the imperialists and the Colombian oligarchy as much as lift one finger, they will face the Bolivian fury of an entire nation and they will be wiped away"

[wierd]

*eats popcorn*

[WealthyRadish]

Probably the best that can be done then, is to set strict regulatory requirements on what gets included and why-- but regulatory capture will always be a thing.

As long as academia is uninterested in quality educational materials, it will just be a non-starter.

One problem is that content regulations are the cause of problems with politicized science textbooks, and another is that there's little reason to ever expect academics to get involved directly.

It's well known that academics have little interest in writing textbooks due to the tedium and lack of incentive, both financially and as a career interruption given the time involved. A result is that the real work of putting together the bulk of the original text and any subsequent revisions is instead usually done by uncredited and sometimes underqualified writers hired by the publishers, with mixed results. This is usually fine given that science textbooks can be written by anybody, but the issue at hand relates specifically to more involved and inherently political topics like history that will never have a clear consensus and are difficult to trust entirely to publishers or state governments.

To me, the problem seems to be the attempt by publishers and governments to create authoritative and comprehensive history textbooks in the first place, which invariably erase or ignore controversy and present the idea of history itself in a misleadingly bland and apathetic light to avoid stepping on toes (as you mentioned earlier with the need to be marketable in Texas influencing the national market). It would make more sense to me for state curriculums to have students read secondary and primary sources instead, to at least ensure a level of quality and academic integrity and avoid the process getting bogged down with a gigantic tome that's impossible to practically review. There still will invariably be some political process to select the content, but at least the text itself would be the real work of historians rather than the product of a questionable commercial-government process.

[scriver]

CA also has such power, which is why we get inundated under a lot of social engineering too.


What really needs to happen, is both states need their hands out of that cookie jar, and an academic consortium with international members needs to define what's in the books- Say, you need to have a good impact score and have contributed to human knowledge in a meaningful capacity to contribute to the curriculum.  People that are going to be harder to buy off for "Jesus want this!!!" reasons.

There's no way I want supposedly "independent" "academic researchers" sent from authoritarian regimes like Russia or China to be influencing school curricula in America. China is known to have tremendous influence on international organizations, which we've already seen recently with the WHO. We need a national standard, at most, not an international one.

In international standard is a great way to suddenly end up with there being no Holodomar, no Armenian genocide, no independent Tibet ever having existed, and Taiwan being erased from the geography book maps.

I'll allow it if we get to chinise Norway back into Sweden

I mean, we got our hand so far up the sauds ass you can see tiny US flag patterned fingernails inside their leadership's mouths when they talk, just as a sort of representative example.

I think you are vastly misrepresenting the Saudi-US power balance. Saudi-Arabia gets their military power through US support, sure. But if they were a puppet state the middle East would be a much, much better place. As it is now, they're more likely to force the US to dance to their pipe than the other way around.

[thompson]

As an academic, I’d like to caution against getting academics to write history textbooks. Some might be brilliant in their fields, but many are opinionated eccentrics that would probably just ram their own idiosyncratic agenda down someone’s throat if given the opportunity. That, and they often suck at pedagogy so don’t have the appropriate skills in the first place. Truth be told, excellent history books already exist. What you need is someone without an agenda selecting them.

[scriver]

But what if their agenda is selecting good books

[Frumple]

I think you are vastly misrepresenting the Saudi-US power balance. Saudi-Arabia gets their military power through US support, sure. But if they were a puppet state the middle East would be a much, much better place. As it is now, they're more likely to force the US to dance to their pipe than the other way around.

It would be a much better place if the parts of the US calling the shots on that front gave a single flying fuck about making it one. Which they demonstrably don't, see the last several decades of U.S. action in the middle east for reference. We are not a good faith actor when it comes to stability in the middle east, at fucking all.