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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& #39;s been exclusively online this year, and I& #39;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& #39;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& #39; heads.
Like the other students in the class, @RayGarofalo will read the entirety of the 1619 Project, and he& #39;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& #39;s good.
But then, like the other students in the class, @RayGarofalo will read critiques of the 1619 Project. He& #39;ll spend five weeks, in fact, reading critiques and commentaries on it. He& #39;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& #39;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& #39; heads. It& #39;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& #39;s do some learning. But be warned: it& #39;s a good deal of work! There are 10 quizzes, 2 exams, 10 writing assignments, lots of reading. I& #39;m not sure being a state legislator has prepared you for that kind of workload.
