Week 3 - EuJune Kim

Week 3

EuJune Kim

Section A01

Kaozong N. Mouavangsou's "Hmong Does Not Mean Free: The Miseducation of Hmong Americans" provided an excellent job shedding the spotlight on the issues of miseducation amongst Hmongs in America.

By splitting this text into four concise parts 1) "reexamin[ing] the impacts of the US educational institution on on the Hmong", 2) "focus[ing]...on the miseducating the Hmong community", 3) using her "personal and educational experience", and 4) concluding and providing an outlook on the "future of Hmong scholarship", Mouavangsou does an exceptional job of explaining the reason for the mis-education and intra-communal drift in Hmong American societies. 

The part that caught my eye the most was part 2 and 3, where Mouavangsou exploits the miseducation of/about Hmongs in the K-12 traditional school system. Based on her own research and other resources, Mouavangsou concludes that overall Hmong culture and literacy is widely ignored due to the misconception that the Hmong were a "primitive, mostly illiterate tribal group". 

In school, she is taught that Hmong people had no "written language and no country". This lead me to rethink about the how poorly the American educational institution really is. Students are never taught the full story - only the viewpoints of the victors from history. By picking and writing about the parts of history that only allude to the descendants of victors, it marginalizes the large group of of 'other' cultures and people as it makes them feel secluded and easily forgettable. 

My question is: how can we revamp the American educational system (especially the history department) to fully immerse students about history of all parts of the world and not just from the viewpoint of victors? 

1. Mouavangsou, Kaozong N. Hmong Does Not Mean Free: The Miseducation of Hmong Americans. Retrieved October 7, 2017

2. Winston-churchill-bad-quote. (n.d). Pastaexplore. https://pastexplore.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/winston-churchill-bad-quote.jpg?w=620&h=424 Retrieved October 8, 2017.