What to teach the kids

[xoxoxoBruce]

No doubt you seen the struggle around the US, by religious zealots and science deniers, to change the textbooks, thereby molding young minds in their own ignorance. We're not alone, Japan seems to have the same problem, only with history. Link BBC

Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia.
~snip~
I still remember her telling the class, 17 years ago, about the importance of Japan's war history and making the point that many of today's geopolitical tensions stem from what happened then. I also remember wondering why we couldn't go straight to that period if it was so important, instead of wasting time on the Pleistocene epoch.

When we did finally get there, it turned out only 19 of the book's 357 pages dealt with events between 1931 and 1945.

There was one page on what is known as the Mukden incident, when Japanese soldiers blew up a railway in Manchuria in China in 1931.

There was one page on other events leading up to the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 - including one line, in a footnote, about the massacre that took place when Japanese forces invaded Nanjing - the Nanjing Massacre, or Rape of Nanjing.

There was another sentence on the Koreans and the Chinese who were brought to Japan as miners during the war, and one line, again in a footnote, on "comfort women" - a prostitution corps created by the Imperial Army of Japan.

There was also just one sentence on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
~snip~
There is controversy over what happened. The Chinese say 300,000 were killed and many women were gang-raped by the Japanese soldiers, but as I spent six months researching all sides of the argument, I learned that some in Japan deny the incident altogether.
Nobukatsu Fujioka is one of them and the author of one of the books that I read as part of my research. "It was a battlefield so people were killed but there was no systematic massacre or rape," he says, when I meet him in Tokyo. "The Chinese government hired actors and actresses, pretending to be the victims when they invited some Japanese journalists to write about them.

"All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated because the same picture of decapitated heads, for example, has emerged as a photograph from the civil war between Kuomintang and Communist parties."

Sure actors, the Japs never did nasty things.

[toranokaze]

We must teach the horrors of the past most of all our own, so they shall not be forgotten or repeated.

[Sundae]

Don't call them Japs though.
No, really. It's like the N word (only not posting so it can't be searched.)

It's funny. Funny-peculiar I mean.
I finally understood a joke I asked about on here a while back.
Something about how the Godless cannot prosper - well then how do you explain Europe?

May have the words wrong.
But I was watching TV and realised just how entrenched Darwinism is, in this country.
How accepted it is.
TV licence payers fund the BBC (yeah, sorry, we're pinko socialists too) and it is simply a given scientific fact that evolution is true and real and happened and all that and everything. No questions.

The gorgeous Prof Cox is allowed on TV because we believe in all this. As is Sir David Attenbrough - okay it's more his bag, but me goodness I have to bring Brian Cox in every now and then in case there are people alive not aware of his loveliness.

To me it beggars belief that it is possible in some schools in the US creationism is considered part of the curriculum.I know there are Christians of different flavours here. And I know the Cellar is not a hotbed of creationism, so nothing here is personal. But bloody hell.

Americans call their President The Leader of the Free World.
C'mon.

Oh, just to even it out a little...
I used to work in a bar every Sunday.
Licencing laws in those days meant you could only open 12.00-15.00.
So at 12.05 the Old Boys came in. Proper old Aylesbury men, Bucks accents, wellies, the lot.
Stayed for two drinks and the roast potatoes (used to be free on the bar - as was cheese and pickled onions) and left. One of them was virulently anti-Jap. Well, that's what he said so thats how I'll write it. He said a lot more about them as well.

He was in a POW camp. His friend was tortured in a bizarre way which was something to do with half a melon taped to an open wound on his back...? In the heat and the humidity it did for him anyway. He died with festering sores and without mercy.

Hard to argue bleeding heart liberalism in the face of that.

[DanaC]

There are schools in the UK that also teach creationism as an alternative view and evolution as a 'theory' rather than fact.

God bless the Labour party for opening up the secondary education to an academy system allowing any tom dick and harry with a big bank balance and a big agenda to run our schools. And all with tax payers along for the economic ride too.

[Lamplighter]

xoB's pic and comment are particularly inflammatory in the US...

Beheading is something we don't do
... and even the thought or anticipation of it boils our juices.

My education by Hollywood movies tells me that beheading is only done by savage cultures,
such as the terrorists of the middle east, the Japanese, the head hunters of Borneo.
... Oh yes, don't forget the French.

But if other cultures do it, does it make us better
... just because we use a gun, a rope, an electric current, or a poisonous gas, or a lethal injection ?

Now come the drones...

[Gravdigr]

I guess everyone wants their chillrens to be able to fend for themselves throughout Life, so...

Teach 'em debating skills and knife-fighting.

[Griff]

My older one has those covered, number 2 not so much.

[Sundae]

Originally Posted by DanaC

There are schools in the UK that also teach creationism as an alternative view and evolution as a 'theory' rather than fact.

I honestly did not know this.
WTF?!

These children surely cannot grow into functioning adults with this mis-information. I don't foist my opinions on anyone (well, except here) but how is it possible to live here with views that are so against the norm? It causes sectarianism and terrorism. As reflected in both Christianity and Islam.

I mean, I worked in a C of E school (note acceptance of past tense. Sigh.)
So shocking to know this is still kicking in this century. America is big enough to absorb fruitloopiness, we're not.

Put them on the Isle of Wight and tow it out to sea, I say.
See? I'm as tolerant as the next fruitloop.

[toranokaze]

Originally Posted by Sundae

I honestly did not know this.
WTF?!

These children surely cannot grow into functioning adults with this mis-information. I don't foist my opinions on anyone (well, except here) but how is it possible to live here with views that are so against the norm? It causes sectarianism and terrorism. As reflected in both Christianity and Islam.

I mean, I worked in a C of E school (note acceptance of past tense. Sigh.)
So shocking to know this is still kicking in this century. America is big enough to absorb fruitloopiness, we're not.

Put them on the Isle of Wight and tow it out to sea, I say.
See? I'm as tolerant as the next fruitloop.

That is one hell of a leap going from creationism to terrorist.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Yes, but it's the only way to put fun in fundamentalism.

[Lamplighter]

Originally Posted by toranokaze

We must teach the horrors of the past most of all our own, so they shall not be forgotten or repeated.

Japan remembers Nagasaki atomic bomb, 70 years on
BBC News - 8/9/15

...A minute's silence and bells marked the time of the explosion in 1945 at 11:02 (02:02 GMT).
...
Nagasaki often gets forgotten as the world focuses on Hiroshima.
But the bomb dropped here was made from plutonium and was even more powerful.

Perhaps the most powerful moment in the ceremony came when survivor Sumiteru Taniguchi got up to speak.
He described his own terrible injuries - of the skin hanging like rags from his arms and back.

But then he turned on Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sitting nearby.
Do not meddle with Japan's pacifist constitution, he warned him.
The audience erupted in loud clapping.

Mr Abe looked straight ahead, showing no emotion.

.

[lumberjim]

I bought a lock picking kit, and am teaching myself and my kids that skill. no particular reason. I just think it's a useful thing to know how to do.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by DanaC

There are schools in the UK that also teach creationism as an alternative view and evolution as a 'theory' rather than fact.

God bless the Labour party for opening up the secondary education to an academy system allowing any tom dick and harry with a big bank balance and a big agenda to run our schools. And all with tax payers along for the economic ride too.

When did you move to the US?
80

[it]

When I was 15 there was a change in government that moved the ministry of education from a progressive-socialist party control to a religious party control, and the first thing they did was to institute a program change in history class- not even waiting for the end of the year.

Within one month they required us to get new books and switched our entire curriculum from one that was focused more on international world wide history throughout the modern era to one was centered locally.

All of a sudden we did study the holocaust, but no longer studied the rest of ww2 - as if the world war was something that happened just to us. We studied the Israeli wars a lot more then before, but no longer included writings from multiple perspectives or got the critique included. The rise of nationalism and communism was already covered but removed from the test and no longer covered for classes after ours, and anything that was further then that - like east Asia - was no longer touched at all.

With the same pool of time and resources as before both set ups had information the other one lacked. But it was interesting to get see the difference, and how completely different something can be framed given the information it is set adjacent too - and perhaps more importantly - the information missing.

[it]

This seems to be staying on my mind... I wonder what would happen if they did learn 20th century history like the rest of us? Would it really incite some level of caution of repeating the mistakes of the past, or would it be more likely to do almost the exact opposite, inspire a nationalist sense of identity infused with a proud military history?