Moments of Permanence - Random: If I Ruled The World

From: sami Date: February 27th, 2012 07:56 am (UTC) (Link)

History would be pretty central in mine, because, you know, my life in part revolves around history. But studying it in depth would wait until high school mostly because I'd want it to hit brains that were a bit more mature, and do so alongside critical thinking.

Part of why I think linguistics is so important is because it's hard to study it without being more-or-less forced to start understanding the ways in which words and ideas have different meaning to different people, as well as some fundamentals of why some cultural differences are just differences, inescapable differences, neither better nor worse either way but something that needs to be incorporated into your understanding.

I think I'd angle for a mixture of freeform and prescriptive. Like, some aspects of European history would be required, because they encapsulate *really important* conflicts of ideas, with lasting effects on the world. Things like the French Revolution and Europe 1890-1945 (with specific focal points around the Dreyfus Affair and the rise of the Nazis, because those two topics can cover, like, 90% of what people ought to know about politics, people, and Things That Should Not Happen).

But those two would only take up about a year between them for students who weren't interested in studying that period further.

History of colonialism and post-colonialism: what colonialism was and why it happened would be a relatively light overview, but the effects of colonialism and the consequences from the colonial era through to the present day would be covered in detail.

(Man, suddenly I want to start working on a syllabus for the Sami School of History.)

There'd be a good amount of study devoted to the history of bigotry. Understanding the covert ways existing power structures reinforce themselves - including case studies of well-meaning people whose unconscious racism caused problems when they totally thought they were helping, because people need to realise a) that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and b) that not everyone who was a racist by contemporary standards was also a horrible person, because if you believe that all racists are necessarily *evil* rather than *misguided* then you set up all sorts of other problems as well.

Plus, research projects every term for which the student would be encouraged to select their own topic, based on whatever catches their interest. Because everyone should also discover the joy of learning for learning's sake.

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