So this $200 3-month rental etextbook that is more than 90% just copy-pasted articles from Free Europe Radio and CNN somehow correctly conveyed that Hitler gained much of his popularity from stoking xenophobia and racializing economic problems.

Without a shred of self-awareness, it then goes on to suggest in the closing section that the decline of the EU is being strongly driven by the mass entry of refugees, going on to describe it as a *flood * of migrants onto European soil'.

I guess when Stalin is written to come off as the larger villain than Hitler, I should've suspected something was up. This is my friend's first history course (at a real college) - are all History departments full of this shit?

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    $200 textbook

    :agony-minion:

    3-month rental

    :agony-shivering:

    etextbook

    :agony-consuming:

    that is more than 90% just copy-pasted articles from Free Europe Radio and CNN

    :agony-4horsemen:

  • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    the US education system was always bad, but it's getting worse because of privatization/deregulation/imperial decline/reactionary indoctrination

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      "Waiting For Superman" era techbro "reforms" did a lot of damage too.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        The education system was inundated with testing and competitive grading since I was in grade school back in the 80s. We segregated schools via the "GT" programs, introduced just as I was entering elementary school. We were dumping fortunes into athletics while gutting arts and sciences and decrediting the teaching profession all the way back in the 90s. All we've really done since then is raise the stakes for individual districts.

        Techbros added their own data-analytics spin so that we could more easily witness the cannibalization of public education in real time. But these changes were being made decades beforehand in a thousand different school districts, even before I was born. We're seeing the harm more clearly than we ever have before. And we're seeing it show up in places that had historically been insulated rather than the spots we've felt we could ignore.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    "Some experts blamed"

    "Everybody is saying it folks" :a-little-trolling:

    • Thomas_Dankara [any,comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      fascists be like:

      migrants are disproportionately convicted of crimes because they're being racially profiled by police and are convenient scapegoats who can be easily blamed for the side effects of capitalism they're savage brutes who must be expelled from the fatherland

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    My history teachers were weird old Jewish leftists and trans guys and Hungarians who taught from the perspective of living through the end of socialism, so... your mileage may vary.

  • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Fighting. Age. Males.

    Without a shred of self-awareness, it then goes on to suggest in the closing section that the decline of the EU is being strongly driven by the mass entry of refugees, going on to describe it as a *flood * of migrants onto European soil’.

    One of those "mistaking the symptom for the disease" right-wing takes that - were I more of a liberal - I might refer to as a Logical Fallacy.

    I guess when Stalin is written to come off as the larger villain than Hitler, I should’ve suspected something was up.

    Hitler's big crime wasn't the Holocaust. It was setting back the neoliberal takeover of Western Europe by several decades. Stalin is a bigger villain because he set back the neoliberal takeover of Eastern Europe by nearly a century. In another ten or twenty years, I can only imagine what the history books will say about China, assuming we continue to acknowledge the country exists at all.

  • The_Walkening [none/use name]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I had an ancient Russian guy teach history, he was cool, didn't ever explicitly get into socialism but his main lens to look at history was through centers of power and their relation to the periphery where they extracted resources/labor.