California - no new textbooks without LGBT history?

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California is a shining example of how America generates such ignorant fools.

Perhaps we should focus teaching kids the basics like reading and writing and math before we worry about the GLBT agenda?

If our schools did a better job of promoting homosexuality, then teen pregnancy rates might be reduced.

If we made four hours of porn a day mandatory it might have similarly beneficial effects let alone bring replacement rate down from 1.7 to possibly somewhere between 0.8 and 1.0.

Phys Ed class would consist of an hour of w*king.

ruveyn

Of course. Any one with an erection lasting more than 4 hours must go to the principal's office.

ruveyn

I learned all this in college/outside of class, not in high school. And I think the point is less about the impact of their sexuality, and more about telling kids LGBT people were involved in general. I don't see the problem with that at all.

Thanks for the pointer on Hadrian, btw. Makes a lot more sense now. Those Romans...

But we really don't know which historical figures were. We have guesses, assumptions and rumours. I don't think those should be taught as history. Retroactive outing is like retroactive diagnosing. It's interesting to speculate that this or that could have been gay based on something somebody once said about that person, but it isn't verifiable history. I think it's interesting to guess that Lincoln had depression and Einstein had autism but it would also be poor history teaching to tell schoolkids that those two retroactive diagnostic guesses are historical fact. This encourages kids to guess and speculate about peoples' orientation and then just assume. I don't think that's a good thing to teach.

I think a better approach to introducing the topic would be to have an overview of how things have been viewed differently throughout history without trying to guessingly apply it to any specific historical figure. I actually did learn that in college history classes (the differing perceptions across time and cultures). It might be too involved for the highschool class. But it;s a lot better than making assumptions about specific people.

Teaching anything but the history of George Washington praying to every tree in the forest or Paul Revere warning the British or old Ironsides sinking the Bismarck in the War of 1912 might confuse students about why President Jefferson Davis's favorite party escape was being in a dress and wig (Everybody already knows why Republicans have such extra-wide girths, but not why that narrow-hip Democrats are bigger in important contrasted focus). Intelligent Design does explain how Bonzo always had Reagan up a tree. Creationism explains the vote count often being greater for Republicans than the number of actual voters. LGBT studies would help students understand much more of the importance of what conservative church officials are actually up to. Harvey Milk might counter the supposed right to be armed and dangerous.

No true history of any specific identifiable group that is "bad", and not just limited to Armenians, Cathars, Swedenborgianism, Naderites,..anything not orthodox and/or not canonical should not be "taught", just "vilified", as most postings here demonstrate. Well, this is somewhat like the stance of some extremists claiming that the study of World War Two is agenda specific proaganda that, as they claim, the Holocaust is a special interest "hoax" to brainwash children to be suckers for one narrow group.

Tadzio

Our schools should be promoting sexuality in general.

They shouldn't be promoting anything of the sort. What they should be doing is educating about it from an objective point of view. Say it how it is, not how people want to see it.

If Bristol Palin had studied Lesbianism in high school, then she might not have disgraced her illustrious family.

Not having been primarily educated in California, I do not know the answer to that. My ideal version of the new law would be the teacher casually acknowledging when we know historical figure X was gay and had to hide that fact, along with any other interesting facets of X's personal life, and moving on to their historical contributions. Or, even better yet, mentioning X's same-sex SO in the same way that straight Mr.Y's hetero partner might be mentioned, without even saying 'gay,' so that there's no sense of strangeness at all to the issue: just a quiet inclusion of the fact that there have always been gay people, that they faced discrimination from it, and that there are good gay people who have contributed greatly to our history.

Which is assuming this historical charecter was actually gay, and many people might assume someone is homosexual simply cause they act different.

Anyways, we are supposed to study people based on their contributions to history, not what we think their sex life was.

In von Humboldt's case, we have some pretty revealing letters written to a male 'friend' of his.

The idea of studying history sans any mention of personality is naive, though; the deism of the founding fathers is an important part of American history, and directly influenced their writings and actions; Harriet Tubman's epilepsy is an important part of her story, and the simple fact of being male or female strongly influenced what people can and could do with their lives. Besides that, history is far more interesting when it is the story of people, and not just a mindless memorization of facts and dates.

As part of the LGBT community, I really do not see the value of this. If they taught how LGBT people were brutally attacked, criminalized, and discriminated against then I can see how that would fit into a history class. When I was in high school, I always wondered why the crimes this country committed against the LGBT community were never taught but crimes against native Amercians were.

I really hope this doesn't turn into speculation on what highly esteemed historical figure was gay or not.

No, it should not come to that. But it is good to mention that some people's contributions to history are belittled based on their sex life. A prime example was Alan Turing, a pioneer in the computer science field. He was gay and society's mistreatment of him directly caused his death. If he lived longer, he would have made more of himself.

People are taught that women and African Americans were discriminated against. Why is LGBT any different?