Amateurish propaganda in Evanston high-school

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Folks,

This one disgusted me more than I imagined it would. Here is a letter I just sent to the Evanston Township High School:

To: Vernon Clark, Lead Dean, Grade 10

Evanston Township High School

Date: Nov. 22, 2009

Sean, my almost step-son, a special needs sophomore, asked me why the Europeans used to think the Africans were uncivilized when the Europeans were the ones who were uncivilized. I asked him who taught him that. Here is part of his lesson material from his African History class.

Another African kingdom ruled by chiefs was in Mali. The people who lived in Mali had their own laws. The people were safe and protected in the kingdom of Mali. Many years later Europeans were to come to Africa from the continent of Europe. The Europeans thought the Africans were very uncivilized. Yet, when Mali existed with its law and order and advanced civilization, the people in Europe were still dying of diseases from the filth of their cities. While the people of Mali walked safely within their kingdom, the Europeans were being murdered in the streets.

I was not familiar with this, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here is a passage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mali

Mali was once part of three famed West African empires which controlled trans-Saharan trade in gold, salt, and other precious commodities.^[6] These Sahelian kingdoms had neither rigid geopolitical boundaries nor rigid ethnic identities.^[6] The earliest of these empires was the Ghana Empire, which was dominated by the Soninke, a Mande-speaking people.^[6] The nation expanded throughout West Africa from the 8th century until 1078, when it was conquered by the Almoravids.^[7]

The Mali Empire later formed on the upper Niger River, and reached the height of power in the fourteenth century.^[7] Under the Mali Empire, the ancient cities of Djenné and Timbuktu were centers of both trade and Islamic learning.^[7] The empire later declined as a result of internal intrigue, ultimately being supplanted by the Songhai Empire.^[7] The Songhai people originated in current northwestern Nigeria. The Songhai had long been a major power in West Africa subject to the Mali Empire's rule.^[7]

In the late 14th century, the Songhai gradually gained independence from the Mali Empire and expanded, ultimately subsuming the entire eastern portion of the Mali Empire.^[7] The Songhai Empire's eventual collapse was largely the result of a Moroccan invasion in 1591, under the command of Judar Pasha.^[7] The fall of the Songhai Empire marked the end of the region's role as a trading crossroads.^[7] Following the establishment of sea routes by the European powers, the trans-Saharan trade routes lost significance.^[7]

In the colonial era, Mali fell under the control of the French beginning in the late 19th century.^[7]

The source for the parts in yellow is the Mali Country Profile of the Library of Congress Federal Research Division (January 2005), found here: http://lcweb2.loc.go...ofiles/Mali.pdf

Where on earth are you people getting your facts from? You call this teaching? This is brainwashing with spite. I will be posting this on my website and lodging complaints where pertinent.

[My signature]

Michael Stuart Kelly

Phone: [my phone number]

The parts that are in a larger font are not that way in my letter. They are highlighted in yellow instead. I cannot do this in a forum post, so this is the work-around I found. Also, I scanned Sean's educational paper and included the scan in my letter (just the paragraph), but here I typed it out since I want it to be able to be searchable in the search engines. Here is the scanned entire page from where the paragraph was extracted:

Now that this absurdity is online and I have a place where I can point to it, I will be looking for places to put it on record.

I'm almost afraid to look at what else they are teaching Sean. But I just might do it.

I am very angry about this.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Here is how I had to undo the false propagandistic impression.

Sean was looking at me with a bit of distrust when I told him that it was a lie that Africa was advanced and safe as opposed to a Europe that was filthy and uncivilized. So we looked up Mali.

After reading a bit, I asked him, "Do you know of any place nowadays in Chicago that is filthy?" He thought, then said yes. Then I asked, "Does that make Chicago uncivilized, with no good places?" He said no.

Then I asked, do you think there was only filth in European cities and no good places at all back in history? He actually had to think to get a new mental impression. Then he said he thought there must have been many good places. Then I asked, "Do you think there was no filth in Mali?" Once again, he had to think to change the mental impression, then agreed that there must have been filth in Mali. I continued, "And how about good places in Mali? Do you think there were good places, too?" He said yes.

Then we started discussing the truth of what went on back then, warts and all, but achievements and all, too.

After a while, he asked me what if the teacher who taught him this false history really didn't know the truth. I replied that if a teacher doesn't know something, he or she should not be teaching it.

Michael

[Greybird]

[...] I replied that if a teacher doesn't know something, he or she should not be teaching it.

Well, that Modest Proposal would instantly disqualify 90 percent of the guards in the teenage work camps teachers in the government schools. And perhaps it ought to do so.

You're entirely justified in your outrage, but I wonder if it might make you feel like King Canute commanding the tides after a while.

[sbeaulieu]

Michael,

It hurt my brain to read something blatantly skewed. But it also hurt to read that piece from a grammatical point of view as well. It read like an unedited high school essay. It might be a good thing to teach our kids to find the fine line between crappy writing and jargon-filled hype (the latter not focusing on the content or distracting from it).

My son will be going to high school next year. His freshman year will be at Radford HS in Hawaii. My view of the Hawaii public school system is not good so far. It's not so much from the subject matter or its contents, but from the management. It'd be nice to send my son to a school where teachers call bullshit when they see it, not peddle it.

Good luck in your efforts, and good on you for being the road sign ;)

~ Shane

Edited November 24, 2009 by sbeaulieu

[Selene]

Michael:

This is not only an important issue for your family, but for the community. I would love to positively employ this discovery and bring the issue before the school board, at a public session, to change the source and purpose of textbooks. In fact, the story would go, is that one of the primary purposes of education is to teach children how to distinguish between what is accurate, logical and provable.

You could create a new awareness in that district and possibly create a policy that would work for the students and save the taxpayers lots of money.

Moreover, you would be building a political organization that would find a leader from its own ranks.

Adam

[DavidMcK]

After a while, he asked me what if the teacher who taught him this false history really didn't know the truth. I replied that if a teacher doesn't know something, he or she should not be teaching it.

Michael

That's a wonderful standard Michael, but if applied across the board in the U.S. today how many teachers would be left? Edit: Oops, I see greybird beat me to this thought!

Edited November 25, 2009 by DavidMcK

[jeffrey smith]

Michael--

First off, I think you should be more concerned with the style of the material more than the content. It doesn't read like a high school essay, as Shane said. It sounds like a middle school essay. No way should something written in such a simplistic manner be acceptable material for a high school student, no matter how special the needs are.

Or maybe that's simply a measure of how much the US education system has degraded since you, I, and the world were young...

As to the content: it's inaccurate because it simplifies too much. If you compare Europe and Ghana in the ninth century CE, you might well conclude that Ghana (in common with most of the Islamic world) was the more advanced society both in terms of intellectual attainment and material level of prosperity. If you compare the same regions in the fifteenth century CE, it's advantage Europe: a measure of how Christian Europe advanced and Islamic Africa stood still in the intervening period. And the bit about people dying from the filth of the streets in Europe is distortion plain and simple: people died from the filth of the streets in Europe all the way through the nineteenth century, and in Mali probably into the twentieth century. I suspect whoever was behind this was trying to counter the vague image most people have of subSaharan Africa as being full of jungles, head hunters, and Zulu spear throwers dancing around in loin cloths before massacring brave British soldiers, and additionally spreading the meme of greedy Europeans pillaging and looting non menacing societies throughout the rest of the world for sake of satisfying their moneylust (which, unfortunately, is too close to the truth: too little of it was motivated by the desire to expand trade between just and honest traders [to use Rand-speak] and too much by the simple desire to loot and to dominate less technologically advanced areas of the world). The West African slave trade that brought African slaves to the Western Hemisphere is closely bound up with the decline of these empires, forming a feedback loop that strengthened both the slave trade and the cultural decline.

And the business about the salt trade is correct. If you've never read it, I suggest a book entitled Salt. I've forgotten the name of the author--he's the one who wrote Cod and A Basque History of the World. There's a reason the regular periodic compensation most of us receive from our employers is denoted by a word that derives form the Latin word for salt...

Jeff S.

Edited November 25, 2009 by jeffrey smith

[Selene]

Michael--

First off, I think you should be more concerned with the style of the material more than the content. It doesn't read like a high school essay, as Shane said. It sounds like a middle school essay. No way should something written in such a simplistic manner be acceptable material for a high school student, no matter how special the needs are.

Or maybe that's simply a measure of how much the US education system has degraded since you, I, and the world were young...

As to the content: it's inaccurate because it simplifies too much. If you compare Europe and Ghana in the ninth century CE, you might well conclude that Ghana (in common with most of the Islamic world) was the more advanced society both in terms of intellectual attainment and material level of prosperity. If you compare the same regions in the fifteenth century CE, it's advantage Europe: a measure of how Christian Europe advanced and Islamic Africa stood still in the intervening period. And the bit about people dying from the filth of the streets in Europe is distortion plain and simple: people died from the filth of the streets in Europe all the way through the nineteenth century, and in Mali probably into the twentieth century. I suspect whoever was behind this was trying to counter the vague image most people have of subSaharan Africa as being full of jungles, head hunters, and Zulu spear throwers dancing around in loin cloths before massacring brave British soldiers, and additionally spreading the meme of greedy Europeans pillaging and looting non menacing societies throughout the rest of the world for sake of satisfying their moneylust (which, unfortunately, is too close to the truth: too little of it was motivated by the desire to expand trade between just and honest traders [to use Rand-speak] and too much by the simple desire to loot and to dominate less technologically advanced areas of the world). The West African slave trade that brought African slaves to the Western Hemisphere is closely bound up with the decline of these empires, forming a feedback loop that strengthened both the slave trade and the cultural decline.

And the business about the salt trade is correct. If you've never read it, I suggest a book entitled Salt. I've forgotten the name of the author--he's the one who wrote Cod and A Basque History of the World. There's a reason the regular periodic compensation most of us receive from our employers is denoted by a word that derives form the Latin word for salt...

Jeff S.

Good points Jeff. Steer us to educational reform

Adam

[Chris Grieb]

Michael; I want to join the the praise for this thankless task.

Where do they come up with such gabarge.