GEORGIA'S HISTORY STANDARDS

Last week I expressed dismay over the Georgia public school curriculum's proposed elision of most of the nineteenth century -- and surprise that this story has been overshadowed by the proposal to ditch the word "evolution." A friendly reader writes:

I cannot help but feel that some people believed that excluding the Civil War and Reconstruction from the high school curriculum would improve the lives of teachers and administrators by avoiding highly charged material. Certainly teachers get it from both sides in some locales. In particular, the neo-confederate movement is quite strong in rural and suburban Georgia.

Tough issue. Unfortunately, an education that never angers parents is likely not to be a good public school education. The job of public schools -- it seems to me -- is to encourage the development of historically-informed skills of critical thinking. Some parents want that, some might not. Those who do not want it should lose. A public school system that encourages parental involvement and that requires good relations with the (property tax paying) public will often fail to live up to the ideal of encouraging the skills necessary to be a good citizen, but it's necessary to keep that ideal in mind nonetheless.