It's 2018 and Still High Schools Aren't Teaching World History? | History News Network - 0 views
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It is as if the creators of the standards had not picked up a book of recent world history scholarship. Not even a textbook.
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At what point does a course claiming to be world history that is regionally and therefore ethnically and racially compartmentalized, a history driven by European Western Civilization canon, a history prioritizing Westerners over Resterners, where the twain of East and West, Global South and Global North never meet go beyond Eurocentrism or ethnocentrism into racism, even if by neglect or ignorance?
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Unfortunately, the course that would be taught in combination would be using outdated world history [sic]standards.
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But since the mid 1990s research journals and books that are multi-regional or global in scope are common. Jared Diamond’s provocative Guns, Germs, and Steelis the best known. Accordingly, new textbooks have incorporated the major arguments from this research into their pages. So has the high school course that gives college credit - Advanced Placement World History.
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The creators of the proposed world history standards for Massachusetts have chosen to ignore these changes in the field of world history.
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To put it in a US history context, this would be like teaching the history of the New England states to 1945, followed by the Mid-Atlantic states to 1945 so on and so forth and then having a majority of the course before and after 1945 focus on those two regions. This would not fly in a US history course. The regional approach could not work in an AP World History course. Yet, somehow in the Massachusetts standards it miraculously persists.
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The result of teaching a not so world history where “civilizations” don’t meet until 1800, where a student can take an entire course (World History I c. 500CE-1800CE) and not see any documents outside of the Western Civilization canon, and finally where the global era is much too focused on the West will lead to students who see the world from outdated, Eurocentric, and racist views. And the fault of this would be the standards makers and the teachers who teach them. We can do better. We need to do better.