Norway: Shock over school reform plans
Shock over school reform plansTeachers, students and experts have expressed widespread bafflement as to how proposed education program reforms can include a curriculum that ignores modern history. A key component in the draft national high school curriculum proposes replacing much Norwegian, European, world and modern history with digital presentations of the Viking age, the rise of the Roman Empire and the development of medieval China. Students already fear a knowledge gap filled by repetitive Power Point presentations on the same few subjects. The new program leaves out the world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, and does not mention the topics of Nazism or Communism. The world wars are potentially included under a clause that would allow teachers and students "to choose and examine two or more recent international conflicts, and assess cause and effect". The reform would further complicate the teaching of general education by reducing the number of hours of history to two hours a week. Criticism of the plan, and its bureaucratic formulation, has come from all quarters, and while Minister of Knowledge Øystein Djupedal has insisted that the reform process will be ready by January 2006 and in force by autumn next year, he has clearly registered the protests.
posted by Unknown @ 4:05 PM
6 Comments:
This is unbelievable! Is it any wonder that we can't fight the current wars we are in? What is the motivation behind this obfuscation of history? Is it that the powers in charge WANT a society of historical amnesiacs? What could possibly come of such ignorant thinking?
Is it that the powers in charge WANT a society of historical amnesiacs? What could possibly come of such ignorant thinking?
Yes, it's deliberate: The destruction of the traditional, Judeo-Christian European nation state, which will leave the road open for your Utopian pet fantasies.
Let me just translate a bit what is sold in the Swedish Stockholm mosque regarding some new history up on sale...:
""Oh Lord, exterminate the Jews, Oh Lord, exterminate the Jews, Oh Lord, exterminate the Jews, Oh curse them and expel them and let them be whipped by suffering, Oh Lord over heaven and earth!
All protests against this will ofcouse be regarded as Islamophobic.
Welcome to the scary new world of revisionist history that the US has been grappling with for some time now. Here is an excellent overview on some of the issues being discussed:
History, Democracy, and Citizenship
"According to Ellington and Eaton, most multicultural theorists (textbook writers, standards creators) espouse the critical separatist view. They cite studies showing that social studies education professors lean far more to the left than other teachers and fault them for their ideas about white privilege, knowledge/power, impossibility of objective truth, etc. Multicultural theorists’ “postmodern perspective” also challenges what is history, what can be taught as history, and what is evidence. “If there are always ‘multiple truths,’” Ellington and Eaton write, “then what is taught as content becomes simply a matter of competing opinions.”
Fjordman is dead-on target in his assessment of their motives.
Here's a clarion cry from the same article to Norwegians who are wondering what this all means:
And what they do know is skewed
"Additionally, proponents of traditional history have charged that the “serious issues…such as what constitutes appropriate history” have been altered beyond recognition by “political correctness,” if not neglected completely.... In his NEH Jefferson lecture, they write, McCullough “decried the way in which the kind of political correctness exposed in this volume [Social Studies] has stripped the American history that today’s students study of any messages as to why we should appreciate the ideals and sacrifices that have made this country great. He called the emerging national historical amnesia rooted squarely in vapid politically correct accounts of our history, a threat to liberty: ‘Something is eating away at our national memory…For a free, self-governing people, something more than a vague familiarity with history is essential if we are to hold on to and sustain our freedom.’”
Proponents of “traditional history” also link this issue to the politicization of the university by “tenured radicals” who have taken over the university and indoctrinated their students with their leftist agendas. Education has become political, and objectivity, traditional values, and academic discipline have gone out the door."
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