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?
the US education system was always bad, but it's getting worse because of privatization/deregulation/imperial decline/reactionary indoctrination
"Waiting For Superman" era techbro "reforms" did a lot of damage too.
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.