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 Rosa Parks 
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After reading the Rosa Parks story about what is myth and truth, it seems like what is taught in schools seems unaccurate. Should we teach both sides of the story in the classroom?

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Rachel Tyler


Tue Apr 17, 2007 12:35 pm
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I am a history major and I think one of the problems with getting the truth is that the textbooks that are used are not always accurate and the teachers take them as truth. I saw a clip from Dateline in one of my other education classes and it talked about how most textbooks, not just history, had a lot of mistakes in them. It also showed how many teachers in different schools did not even catch the mistakes and were teaching exactly out of the books. I think this shows that some teachers are not always trained as well as they should be.


Wed Apr 18, 2007 9:56 pm
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I think schools should have an american history "myth-busters" like class. (we have a wonderful early american lit. course along those lines here at ASU), there are so many bunk conceptions that are instilled in kid's heads, that our history is more or less becoming like a Greek Epic.

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Robert Chase Glenn


Thu Apr 19, 2007 3:27 pm
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It’s a difficult thing to decide. There is a difference in a history lesson being a portion of a story and it being wrong. I think the problem is that when we think about not telling the whole story, we are often talking about omitting portions of that story to preserve the image or reputation a person or a group of people. Whether we consider it our mission to preserve that image in order to maintain a sense of integrity that maybe false, or to out individuals by revealing the possible imperfections in their actions or selfishness of their motivations, they both seem to me to be an overly emotional and therefore subjective attachment to one side or the other. History is not immune to the Hawthorne effect. If we go looking for untarnished valor we often find it. If we go looking for greed and deviousness, we often find that too. The truth is almost always a mixture of the two and countless other nuanced elements that all make up human nature and society.
As a result, we can never tell the whole story; it is millennia in the making. The future history teachers among us will all have to pick and chose what to teach and what to omit. If telling the whole story only means that a teacher only tells the good parts, then that teacher runs the risk of disassociating their students with the subject matter and creating a level of distrust between the teacher and the student. If a teacher feels that telling the whole story is always focusing on the flaws that they feel the history books leave out, then that teacher runs the risk of trivializing some important people and events in order to insure that students know the dirty secrets of the dead, perhaps to the detriment of the lesson. Personal agendas by their very nature bully objectivity into submission, as do emotional responses.

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Matthew Pickard


Fri Apr 20, 2007 4:39 pm
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I love the idea of a history "myth-busters" course in high school because so much of what we learn is not accurate. My social studies methods teacher is one of the best teachers that I have ever had and he said that one of the most accurate history books is "US History for Dummies." I think that shows a lot about America and our educational system.

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Amanda Jill Roberts


Tue Apr 24, 2007 12:12 pm
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