Wednesday, December 15, 2010

The courses of history

It seems gay California senator Mark Leno want to have LBGT history in the school curriculum. With no sense of irony, he dubs his bill the Fair Accurate Inclusive and Respectful Act. And hooks it to the cause du jour, bullying.

At the point where kids start studying contemporary history...last two years of high school?...it makes sense to notice the emergence of a public gay identity, etc. But like all victim groups, I am sure that this bill's sense of Fairness and Accurate will require that the content play second fiddle to its sense of what Respectful means. No warts allowed, I suspect.

Teaching history to children, IMHO, should not be the same as studying history in graduate school. To teach history to children should be, frankly, indoctrination and identity-forming. Their simplistic and black-and-white and herd-driven attitudes are developmentally out of sync with critical historical research. That attitude often persists well into graduate school and tenure!

But my real objection is that it imposes the very particular "LGBT" social construction. Sexual orientation will be subsumed, really, under the meta-heading of gender dysphoria: gays are boys who act like girls, lesbians are girls who act like boys, and transgenders are boys who are really girls and get boob jobs and have their dicks cut off and are girls who are really boys and have their boobs cut off and want to have dicks.

Count me out. Not my peeps. Not me.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Possibly the greatest understatement seen so far at "USMaleSF": (last line): »To teach history to children should be, frankly, indoctrination and identity-forming. Their simplistic and black-and-white and herd-driven attitudes are developmentally out of sync with critical historical research. That attitude often persists well into graduate school and tenure!« Often! ...
P.S. In terms of social ideology, sorry but presumably you don't have the right to not include yourself in LGBT identity system. Hmpf! "Gender dysphoria" indeed!

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