The History of The World According To Gits
Jun. 1st, 2010 09:35 amVia ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chairman_wow, today's helping of "...oh really." Really. "Because the world was Eurocentric." Really. Is that so.
Right. Looking a bit further. There's a thing in the Financial Times that is an extract from his paper, in which he says that Eurocentrism is fine, because Europe is really rich and stuff, which I find myself interpreting to mean that in his world people without money are hardly people at all, so what other parts of the world could possibly matter?
But he says,
Let me not be misinterpreted. The point of studying western ascendancy is not to slip covert imperialist apologia into the curriculum. On the contrary, the great strength of this framework is that it allows students to study world history without falling into the trap of relativism, i.e. arguing as if the Ashanti Empire were in some way the equal of the British Empire.
...so it's all OK! He doesn't want to be misinterpreted, so I'd better delete my post and go away. No, wait. Also, what is the man on about with that comparison, and why is this all about whosearmy income dick is biggest again?
Look. Telling people that Europe is the fucking be all and end all of civilisation for the past five hundred years is what we call relativism, actually, and encouraging fucking imperialism apologist bastards to keep doing their thing, and also bloody stupid. This is not an exhaustive list & I'm sure I could do some more creative things with swear words if you have a moment. Being a world power is not actually the same thing as ruling the world, and have we seriously not done enough to erase other cultures from our world-view yet? Do we need to keep trying?
This is actually just a quick sample of the things he says, here and in other places on the internet that I've just been wandering through, that make me go ICK ICK ICK. I saved the full version forvalborg, who is good at dealing with righteous fury.
Anyway, I don't think that some kind of structure to history as taught in schools is actually necessarily a bad thing, and there absolutely is a problem with the scope of history as taught in the UK right now - but if the suggested structure only reinforces the already pretty entrenched idea around here that European History Is World History then I'm against.
(Hi! My computer is alive again, but became alive right before my mother came to visit for a long weekend, so I continued to not be online. I think there are quite a few things I meant to check out. I just need to find them.)
chairman_wow, today's helping of "...oh really." Really. "Because the world was Eurocentric." Really. Is that so.Right. Looking a bit further. There's a thing in the Financial Times that is an extract from his paper, in which he says that Eurocentrism is fine, because Europe is really rich and stuff, which I find myself interpreting to mean that in his world people without money are hardly people at all, so what other parts of the world could possibly matter?
But he says,
Let me not be misinterpreted. The point of studying western ascendancy is not to slip covert imperialist apologia into the curriculum. On the contrary, the great strength of this framework is that it allows students to study world history without falling into the trap of relativism, i.e. arguing as if the Ashanti Empire were in some way the equal of the British Empire.
...so it's all OK! He doesn't want to be misinterpreted, so I'd better delete my post and go away. No, wait. Also, what is the man on about with that comparison, and why is this all about whose
Look. Telling people that Europe is the fucking be all and end all of civilisation for the past five hundred years is what we call relativism, actually, and encouraging fucking imperialism apologist bastards to keep doing their thing, and also bloody stupid. This is not an exhaustive list & I'm sure I could do some more creative things with swear words if you have a moment. Being a world power is not actually the same thing as ruling the world, and have we seriously not done enough to erase other cultures from our world-view yet? Do we need to keep trying?
This is actually just a quick sample of the things he says, here and in other places on the internet that I've just been wandering through, that make me go ICK ICK ICK. I saved the full version for
valborg, who is good at dealing with righteous fury.Anyway, I don't think that some kind of structure to history as taught in schools is actually necessarily a bad thing, and there absolutely is a problem with the scope of history as taught in the UK right now - but if the suggested structure only reinforces the already pretty entrenched idea around here that European History Is World History then I'm against.
(Hi! My computer is alive again, but became alive right before my mother came to visit for a long weekend, so I continued to not be online. I think there are quite a few things I meant to check out. I just need to find them.)
