- cross-posted to:
- desantisthreatensusa@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- desantisthreatensusa@lemmy.world
Board of education replaces course at 12 public universities with own US history curriculum, in latest ‘anti-woke’ attack
Educators are warning that college enrollment in Florida will plummet after the state removed sociology as a core class from campuses in the latest round of Ron DeSantis’s war on “woke ideology”.
The Republican governor’s hand-picked board of education voted on Wednesday to replace the established course on the principles of sociology at its 12 public universities with its own US history curriculum, incorporating an “historically accurate account of America’s founding [and] the horrors of slavery”.
The board faced a backlash last summer for requiring public schools to teach that forced labor was beneficial to enslaved Black people because it taught them useful skills.
The removal as a required core course of sociology classes, which Florida education commissioner and staunch DeSantis acolyte Manny Díaz insisted without evidence had “been hijacked by leftwing activists”, follows several other recent “anti-woke” moves in education in Florida.
Although the general education classes like psychology and sociology are annoying, they’re all essential knowledge for being an educated human being. It’s a shame Florida wants their population to be ignorant conservatives.
If you’re referring to today’s definition of “conservative”, that’s redundant.
When was conservatism not ignorant? Certainly not in my lifetime. It’s been an ideology of anti-intellectualism for at least three decades now.
True, but now it’s off the rails.
Edit:
source
Barry Goldwater was considered the father of the modern conservative movement; his wife’s work would likely result in his excommunication from today’s Republican Party.
30 years is maybe pushi… Oh wait, that’s only 1994. Yeah, you’re right.
The Luddite movement was conservative. The Luddite movement was also exactly right about where work automation would lead.
I’d also argue anti-colonialist guerrillas are usually trying to conserve their way of life, making them conservative.
Sometimes conservatism can be pretty based.
It’s a bummer that you had that experience. Mine were absolutely fascinating. That said, my school had some flagship social science departments, so the people that instructed there were not the b-team.
If a university doesn’t have a good program in a particular discipline, good people don’t want to work there, and the current staff often don’t have the expertise to hire for it.
They’re alright classes. I enjoyed the professors I had but I feel like the majority of people want to speed through the GEs and get going on their actual major classes.
Besides for my intro to philosophy course I don’t think I got much out of my GEs.
I remember writing a research paper on roe v wade not to long ago. Thought it would be an easy paper that’s kind of socially acceptable and not at all controversial. Found out that conservatives do wild shit like kill doctors and harass rape victims. I hate society.
The quality of an overall department and the quality of classes taken by non-majors to fulfill degree requirements are two different things. For example, my university has a great architecture school, but that didn’t stop the “history of industrial design” class I took to fulfill my art requirement (as an engineering major) from being mostly an exercise in memorizing pictures of chairs.
Did your university have a good industrial design or product design department? Industrial design is very very different than architecture. (I went to school for industrial design and instructed university courses in the department)
It appears to be ranked in the top 10 in the lists I checked, so yes.
Interesting. Bummer that you got a shit class. Mine GE history glass was pretty good, and it got into the different design movements, what drove them, and how they impacted industrialization, usability, accessibility, and other elements of contemporary life.
Look at the entrance polls for the Republican primaries.
There’s a 30 point spread between Trump’s support depending if the person went to college or not.
How much is correlation vs cause and effect is debatable, but certainly in a democracy an educated public can’t hurt.
Sociology was my favorite general ED class outside of my discipline. I’m sure it varies by teacher but it can be really fun and interesting!
Yeah I really enjoyed how society thinks and behave. Still, I wouldn’t major in it.
Sociology sure, I don’t know about the intro to psychology experience of ‘hey check out all these famous theories, paradigms, and experiments. At least half of which are largely disproven or under serious doubt but we wont say which.’
Depends on the school and professor I guess. My intro to psych class made it clear how much older paradigms are, basically, just flights of fancy, however there is a foundation of moving towards a system of discovery and diagnoses that was important, instead of literally super natural explanations. With new stuff they went over how difficult it is to create solid proofs and the reasons why. They also would do what they could to make sure we understood why they came to the conclusions they did and the short comings of those reasons and practices.
i would add to this that early conceptualizations of psychology have had massive cultural impacts. if you enjoy art, film, literature from the last century and change, it’s worth knowing about Freud and Jung.
their ideas represent an evolution of thinking about people, their minds, their relationships to others and to their environment or to god, but they also underpin so much we take for granted at present in popular culture and day-to-day conversation (at least in “the west”).
Yes, didn’t want a wall of text explaining all the context the course provided about the different times and now. The roots of it are clearly what we would now consider quackery. However the simple foundational idea that there is something identifiable, explainable, and maybe curable was revolutionary. This was in a time when explanations ran from miasma to demonic possession. So it is worth knowing about for the historical perspective, I totally agree. I was just more sorta shocked there are professors still telling people that our scientific body is the ultimate facts on the matter.
Yeah much better, ‘hey check out a half century of our field producing mostly bullshit, this is a good use of your time.’
My point being if you can’t put together a full 1 term curriculum of “here are the fundamentals of our field that we are sure or 99% sure about” then maybe its not a productive use of time to require every single college student spend a class on it.
If you want a history of pseudoscience class then have a history of pseudoscience class.
Well I am sorry that you see no value in understanding how the thing you are studying came to be. However, the majority of people do. Literally every subject I learned did this.
I don’t remember chemistry 101 being 70% about alchemy and phlogiston. This is almost exclusively a phenomenon with intro psychology classes.
If you want to study it fine whatever but there’s no reason it should be a standard GE requirement instead of something like philosophy of science, international relations, genocide studies, etc.
You went to a very different school than I did. We absolutely learned about the development of chemistry in introductory courses. Same with mathematics, physics, etc. This even included getting into how they co-developed. There was a deeper dive into in the liberal arts because it’s it is more important, as they are less mechanical, but STEM definitely got into the basic history of the subject.
Don’t worry, not just the old ones are pseudoscientific