education

so I've been reading this washington post forum about AP and IB education, and there's this one lady on the forum who's convinced that IB is this big socialist conspiracy to turn America's children into young pioneers. Also, everything that's wrong with US education today is the fault of the Liberals. (and Californians, but really Californian is a synonym for liberal.)

Her evidence for IB is that it's based in Geneva (those scary Swiss people are corrupting our minds?), it has an association with the UN (I guess some right wingers think it's a clever socialist enterprise to destroy America), and in her son's IB US History class, they had to read Howard Zinn. I really want to respond to her, but jesus christ, do I have to sit there and find sources to prove that the UN is not a socialist conspiracy? I'm lazy. Also, I'd want to be nice and polite about it because I can't post anonymously, but that removes like 98% of the fun, so I probably won't bother.

But the thing is, I was still thinking, "maybe I can prove to her that reading Zinn, as long as you read other history books too, is fine. After all, kids should be taught to evaluate their sources critically, and besides, he approaches history in a way not traditionally found in High School textbooks. For one thing, he remembers that women and minorities exist." So I started googling IB US History reading lists, and a couple things happened. First of all, I started feeling this weird nostalgia for my old history books Boller and Boyer. Let's consider for a moment that I barely even read the Boyer. what? It was boring. I liked primary sources. But still, it was funny to see their names on a bunch of reading lists again. Second of all, I started getting really grateful that I was done with high school. The syllabi had cutesy idiotic word puzzles to teach you the name of random European rivers, dumb map quizzes, and waay too much rote memorization for my taste. My high school wasn't that bad, but I wonder, with the kids all reading just a boring textbook and doing lots of mindless busywork, how does anyone in those classes graduate from high school liking history at all?