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I want to invite @RayGarofalo, the author of the Louisiana bill that would ban teaching about racism in K-12 and college classrooms, to take my U.S. history survey course at Louisiana Tech. It's been exclusively online this year, and I'd be delighted for him to take all of it.
I get the sense from the way @RayGarofalo writes about history as a discipline, he hasn't been in a college history class in decades. Even history professors of a conservative bent would find fault with his idea that teaching history is just dumping facts into students' heads.
Like the other students in the class, @RayGarofalo will read the entirety of the 1619 Project, and he'll be invited to assess it on its own merits. He will find a lot of ideas in there that make him uncomfortable, as students do, and that's good.
But then, like the other students in the class, @RayGarofalo will read critiques of the 1619 Project. He'll spend five weeks, in fact, reading critiques and commentaries on it. He'll be invited to reassess in writing his impressions of the project in light of those critiques.
And @RayGarofalo will even spend one week reading and writing about an explicitly political, partisan counterpart to the 1619 Project—the 1620 Project. I ask students to explore the project's website and write about it in light of what they learned about the 1619 Project.
In all of this @RayGarofalo will discover, I hope, that history as a discipline is not about dumping the correct facts into students' heads. It's about our interpretations of the past, their constant evolution, and how those interpretations help us better understand our present.
So please, @RayGarofalo, get at me. Let's do some learning. But be warned: it's a good deal of work! There are 10 quizzes, 2 exams, 10 writing assignments, lots of reading. I'm not sure being a state legislator has prepared you for that kind of workload.
