btw. I understand that it's different in the US because you have 100 times more immigrants (or even more) than we have here in PL
It's terrible... Simply terrible. Good parent with some teaching skills would teach all of this in one month, maybe in three.

Education system sucks.

Ps. it's kinda similar now in Poland. It was better 10 years ago, and even better 20 years ago, Our societies become dumber and dumber with each generation..

1. Picking cotton is closely associated with slavery here, and if you say it to a black person it's considered a racial slur of a sort.

2. The question about beatings per day is a good thing to ask children?

They were some stupid questions, agreed, but it's not a newsworthy story at all. At most it should have been a meeting between teachers and parents (although I don't even think that's necessary, the teacher most likely knows that it was some stupid questions), but anything more than that is just unnecessary.

You know, there are still parts of the world where "slavery" is very much present (in brackets because in may countries "indentured servitude" isn't illegal).

The idiotic thing here is that they pictured something deplorable as a neutral thing, completely sterile of the context of these people having to work in awful conditions under threat of bodily harm or starvation if they don't work hard. E.g.:

-Man worked in the field. He produced six bags of carrots.
-Man was forced to work in the field. He only produced six bags of carrots. He will not receive his daily ration of food for the next day and will be hit with a stick many times until his productivity improves.

Same person, only given no context for his actions in the first example.

The problem is that it doesn't reward the best students it rewards the early bloomers. I don't generally refer to my intellectual capacities much because it's arrogant. But, I do have an IQ of 142 with 130 being sufficient to be classified as a genius and I barely spoke until I was about 10 or so, spent much of first grade in special education classes because I wasn't catching up. [/arrogance]

In your system I would have been completely screwed because I wasn't an early bloomer even though later on I went on to dominate the vast majority of the people I come into contact with intellectually. I've never met anybody that could keep up with my capacity.

As for your comment about Asian students, they spend 12 hours a day in class often times 7 days a week, they do learn more, but they're also notorious for being unwilling to keep up in college as they're burnt out before they enter the college. At leas that goes for Chinese, Japanese and Korean students studying at home.

If they're system is so much better than ours, then why precisely is it that they're trying to make their educational system more like ours?
A lot of this stuff isn't going to make sense unless you've spent a lot of time in the US. I'm sure there are things that are a big deal in Italy that would puzzle me as to why precisely it is that they're a big deal.

It's really hard to appreciate the cumulative effect of post-slavery oppression via things like poll taxes and tests as well as economic policies that for nearly a century ensured that black people weren't able to achieve much no matter how much they work.

1. During american history black slaves were used to pick up cotton, that's the lesson that they were (presumably) trying to teach, so if you want to teach history you can't just take out the things that are "racist". might as well better tell fairy tales then.

2. I never got a News channel to interview my school every time i got asked a stupid question.


Alright let's make an example, if a teacher here made a crosslesson about the fascisct involvement in the holocaust going along the lines of:
"If Milan had 100 jews and each day the fascists would capture 10 and send them to the nazis, how many jews would remain after 4 days?"

yes it's a horrible generalization of the holocaust and an horrible example of teaching, and parents would go to the principal and ask what the hell that was about, but it wouldn't be a news headline.

Thing is asking a young child to figure how many beatings someone took per day/week isn't right, and picking cotton is very racially insensitive over here.

Example: (This is just an example....I'm not trying to be truly racially insensitive here.)

It'd be like asking Italian students "If your salami eating, greasy moustached wop brother gino had an extortion racket going and extorted three elderly shopkeeps a week for 52 dollars total.... one paying 32% of that total, one paying 26%, and the last paying 42%, how much did each shopkeep pay?

Yes but the point of this thread is to discuss whether or not the questions/teacher's acts were racist(indirectly or not) and what the consequences should be, not if the news piece was worthy of airtime.

If the historical lesson would be about the Mafia's impact on economy and you took the exaggerated parts out of it. then yes it actually sounds like an acceptable assignment.

They were trying to teach history, since we haven't heard the explanation behind the assignment we can't tell if they did a good job at explaining what american slavery actually was about.

Let's assume they failed. in that case the parents should go to the principal tell them the teacher did a very bad job, and the principal in turn decides to let it pass for now or take action.

I don't see how racisms is involved in any way here

Einstein was screwed, too. Education system "left him behind" , so he had more time to be the best at areas he was the best.

With IQ over 140 i may say, educational system slowed you down when you had problems with basics, instead of maximizing your potential.

If you spend too much time learning basic bullshit, you may actually waste your talent.

I don't know if I would call it racist but that second question is still fucked up.

This is how I see it as well. Its like giving the middle finger someone who knows what that means, vs giving it to someone who lives somewhere that they don't use it. To them its just another finger. It wouldn't seem like such an insult.

Propably world-widely known that this is a bit racist country. But there are oh many reasons.
Ctime statistics has rised
Freedom of speech.. there is no more. (don't know if there ever was in any country)
Prosperity.. Rich get richer and vice versa. I say it again, wht does rappers need all those bling-things.
Why in my country social security or what it is called gives more money than own people?
We have too lame jailtime. All should be fried if it is sure that he or she did it.
What the hell was that, I was going in shop and all the things were kind of a hidden.. my god, that is the biggest problem?
Then.. cultural difference-shield. Why they don't have to obey anything.
lastly.. where is my broken sword, well the new one, after that moses staff..

Oh god, don't get me started. Believe it or not, these are "progressive" ideas: cross-curriculum is one of the dumbest ideas ever, you can't force it into every situation like the "progressive" administrations think you can.

1. What if they stated it just as I did, or maybe similarly to where it was still as offensive sounding?

2. They might not have been trying to be offensive on purpose. Even if this is true, it's still unintentionally racist(in it's wording) to a small degree. Also you find no problem with asking kids how many beatings a slave got over the week?

Regardless of whether or not a specific race was mentioned, the mere fact that those were questions on a test is depressing because we're supposed ti be getting over that part of our history. It sucks to hear about these things, but at the end of the day you can't change an individuals mind, it's up to them to do so.

It's offensive in the sense that slavery was (And still is) wrong, and that the faster we can move on from that point in time, the better. If there is any bright side, at least no specific race was singled out, though you can only imagine what was implied (Not to mention that they used the name Frederick]).