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You can not be serious.

   

Luckily I'm old enough that I don't have to give a shit about this anymore. I went to my son's frat meeting (I was in the same frat, back in the mid-14th century). You know these were the engineers who were already and old boys' club, and you throw frat on top of that.

Anyway I figured that nowadays the frat would be Woke City, because you read about all this insanity going on on the campuses. But no, it was the same. The kids are alright.

I mean they've toned down a bit--no more printing dirty/racist/sexist/homophobic jokes in the weekly newsletter and all that. fact is they've toned down not because of these screaming barely coherent lefties, but because, in fact, there are way more female engineers, openly gay engineers, and more diversity all around.

   

And can these people who see everything through the prism of inequity read a history book. They have really convinced themselves that all the shit that happened was not because they ran into a far superior military, but because we were white. I've even seen academics discussing if there was some aberrant gene that made white people crazy (forgetting that, at the same time, they claim their is scientifically no such thing as race).

No. History is fucking horrible and mostly it's been marauding hordes chasing people around and killing or enslaving them.

   

Wish I'd never replied in this thread at all. There's no real-world evidence that's enough to convince the other side that things aren't what they were in 1960, or even enough to dissuade them from their actual belief that things are worse now than they were before the US Civil War. They don't want a discussion, any more than Jon Stewart did when he laid that trap for Andrew Sullivan. They only want the alleged "moral" knockout to give them a dopamine rush and convince them of their goodness. I should have known better, and I'm really mad at myself for not growing up, like a thread entitled "The Problem With White People" wasn't just a massive fucking virtue-signaling landmine waiting for a goof like me to be dumb enough to step on it.

While we're doing this, talking in circles, everyone else of all colours are out there living their lives the best they can and not dwelling obsessively about any of this divisive shit at all. We're the weird ones for being OCD over these things, not the ones who don't waste their time this way.

Last word on this. I'm not going to post in these sorts of threads anymore.

   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sgp6jci ... WL&index=4

   

I wish one day we could live in a world where we could all just get along.

When there is no need for discussion about WHAT a person is but WHO that person is.

When demographics don't create divisions.

...and so much more...

   

Honestly, not really. When I was in high school in the 80s, there wasn't much about indigenous culture at all really, just that trope that Canada treated their natives way better than the USA. After all, we didn't send the army after them (Riel didn't count because he was a traitor), and we traded fairly with them, and signed treaties and all that other 'Canada is good' mythology.

The history we were taught was that nothing really bad ever happened and Canadian history was generally pretty dull. I do not remember anything being mentioned about residential schools at all, though we did briefly talk about McDonald's desire to assimilate indigenous peoples into white society.

Granted, this was in Alberta, where we've had conservative governments for most of our history, so our curriculum has been suspect for a long time.

Then I went to university and realized all the Canadian history I previously learned was BS. But even what I learned in university didn't really delve into the atrocities that have come to light in the past decade. Even my Metis friends didn't realize how horrific our past was until pretty recently.

I think part of it is due to the fact that we don't really teach history in junior high/high school here in Alberta. We have Social Studies, and many teachers focus more on economics (capitalism/communism) and political science (democracy/totalitarian government), with a smattering of history, geography, etc. thrown in.

As someone who loves history, I often felt Social Studies was a let down. Even the Holocaust was only briefly touched on in high school - it wasn't until I went to university and took several advanced history courses that I really learned how evil and horrific it really was.

   

Exactly, we were never told this was a genocide. We were told mistakes happen, some may have been abused but we did the best we could there may be some dead but it was years ago...move on. And it was never signal boosted. Barely a footnote.

   

Social Studies was one of the massive failures in the education changes back in the 1970's thru 90's when History got merged with a hodge-podge of partial sociology and other supposed society-centric aspects. If there was a pointless class that taught absolutely nothing of value then SS was it. It was fine and dandy to do a half semester on the Bushmen of the Kalahari. You'd think though that learning about our own country first should have been higher up on the priority list. And not just rote history either. Like concentrate on who we are, how we got this way, what our successes are, what our failures are.

Social Studies also seemed to have a problem in that the teachers had far too much leeway to tailor the class according to their own personal politics. Like, what good is accomplished at all if a bunch of already bored and thoroughly disinterested kids are being taught, like one of my classes was in Grade 10, by some Reagan-loving quasi-libertarian who couldn't bother to disguise his contempt for Canada? They really needed better supervision over the teachers to make sure they weren't going off-reservation with their own various opinions & idiocies.

   

99% of the teachers had never taught at a residential school, had as much of an idea of what was happening as we did.
And if you're my age, you lived in the city and there was maybe ONE native kid who lived off rez and went to your school, not the residential school.
I mean THE black kid in out class seemed embarrassed when we learned about slavery in Social Studies.
Different times, different outlooks, different definitions of things

   

We did learn about our own history but it was whitewashed and happy, with lots of treaties and natives helping us whities make maple syrup, guide us across the Rockies or similar shit.

I fully agree that teachers were (maybe still are) allowed to tailor the curriculum to what they want to teach. I remember spending months on communism/fascism/capitalism in Grade 12, then spending one day on World War 1 and another on World War2, none of which mentioned Canada's part in either war. That was because my social teacher was head of the 'Peace Club' at school and a complete peacenik. She was a good teacher and nice enough, but she was the stereotypical sandal-wearing, Marxist-idolizing social teacher conservatives love to complain about. Of course back in the day, I was a complete Alex P. Keaton type who wore t-shirts that said 'Peace through Superior Firepower' and 'Uzi does it'!

After a more balanced history and political science education at university, I'm much more moderate now than I used to be, though I'm more hawkish than most centrists.

   

High school in the 80's was pretty fucked up. I'm still amazed anyone survived it.

   

I graduated in '86 and I'm still alive! I agree though. I remember having a terrible algebra 11 teacher and I actually dropped out of the class before the final exam because I was doomed to possibly fail and math had always been my strongest subject. He was a science teacher who seemed to only be teaching algebra because the school lacked qualified ones to teach it. He seriously used to write out equations on the blackboard and as you were taking it in and writing it all down he would realize an error and erase it all and start over. FFS! I took the course again in grade 12 first semester with a great teacher and I did very well, A or B anyway.


That's funny that you mention this. When I was reading the posts here all I could remember specifically about Social Studies was the push from the teacher about which political party we should vote for when we became of age to do so.

   

Social studies was one of the courses I purposely fucked up. So I got a B instead of an A because the hotties didn't like Brainiacs.
I remember getting a light cuff on the head for answering on the final that the head of the Canadian Army in WW2 was General Motors....

   

I had a Prof in University that would do that. He'd make a simple mistake, continue on for 3 boards of calculations before realizing that it made zero sense. Then he'd abandon it, and go to the next example. Meanwhile we were all sitting there with our arms waving in the air, ready to point out the mistake.

He never turned around to look at us, in an entire semester. I had to take the same course again, next semester with a different prof.

   

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