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California public school enrollment sees big drops

latimes.com

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Re: California public school enrollment sees big drops

#41
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of those things is much worse than the other two. Two are limitations in education, the other is not allowing people to come from that country at all. No, trying to erase the culture of people who are already here out of xenophobia is much worse than exercising border control over who can immigrate. More importantly, most German and Italian Americans are descended from the people who faced discrimination. By co…

You are ignoring the fact that education is local, that education in California is going to be biased to California history rather than New York's history. There is so much to cover, that educators prefer to prioritize local/regional topics. I never heard much about Japanese interment when I went to school in Mississippi, but I heard plenty about the civil war (over and over again, sheesh). But when I went to school…

> You are ignoring the fact that education is local, that education in California is going to be biased to California history rather than New York's history.

There are 5.6 million Asians in California. The vast majority have no connection whatsoever to Chinese railroad workers or Japanese internment. Moreover, the model curriculum also covers Hmong and Cambodian immigrants, which number less than 100,000 each, and don't have any particular connection to California (apart from California being a big state and having a lot of every group). Meanwhile, Orange County has 140,000 German Americans, and for some reason they don't merit an ethnic studies unit.

> That California biases to Asian and Hispanic history in the Americas is purely due to California being located in California rather than New York.

That doesn't explain why the model curriculum frames "ethnic studies" almost entirely in terms of sob stories. Nor does it explain why the curriculum draws a stark distinction between white kids, who aren't invited to identify with historic oppression, and Asian and Hispanic immigrants, who are.

Re: California public school enrollment sees big drops

#42
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are ignoring the fact that education is local, that education in California is going to be biased to California history rather than New York's history. There is so much to cover, that educators prefer to prioritize local/regional topics. I never heard much about Japanese interment when I went to school in Mississippi, but I heard plenty about the civil war (over and over again, sheesh). But when I went to school…

> You are ignoring the fact that education is local, that education in California is going to be biased to California history rather than New York's history. There are 5.6 million Asians in California. The vast majority have no connection whatsoever to Chinese railroad workers or Japanese internment. Moreover, the model curriculum also covers Hmong and Cambodian immigrants, which number less than 100,000 each, and do…

> There are 5.6 million Asians in California. The vast majority have no connection whatsoever to Chinese railroad workers or Japanese internment.

They definitely empathize with it, more than gangs of New York-style stories pitting Italian vs. Irish immigrants.

> Moreover, the model curriculum also covers Hmong and Cambodian immigrants, which number less than 100,000 each, and don't have any particular connection to California

Given that there are that many of them in San Jose, why not include it there? I'd expect something like that in Minneapolis as well, I would expect the same. Arabs in Dearborn, seems like fair game to me.

> Nor does it explain why the curriculum draws a stark distinction between white kids

They actually do mention white kids, Slavic and Jewish are in the books we get at my kindergartener's west coast school. I noticed you didn't mention those, however. Mostly it doesn't matter since white kids are still in the majority, why would they emphasize majority experiences when talking about minorities?

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