Jenna Lee ASA 002 A03 Week 6

          This week’s reading that I would like to introduce is Kaozng N. Mouavangsou’s “Hmong Does Not Mean Free: The Miseducation of and by Hmong Americans”. The author works to argue how the Hmong are not treated equally in the United States and that one of the main reasons for this is at the faults of the U.S. educational systems. Mouavangsou mentions how “the educational system is constructed to foster the perception that America is great [but this] constructing America as great has been done at the expense of devaluing other cultures”, which I can definitely relate to as a student who has been taught with the U.S. educational system my entire life (Mouavangsou 211). I have attended Preschool, Elementary School, Middle School, High School, and I am now currently attending College in the U.S. All throughout those many years of U.S. education, I can barely recall learning about the Hmong. Even though they were briefly mentioned in my High School history courses, they were never covered in depth. The author also brings up Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures (1997), a novel about the cultural clashes of Hmong medicine and Western medicine of which I had to read in my cultural anthropology class (ANT2) taken during my studies at UC Davis. From this reading, I was given the image that Hmong people have more primitive ways of thinking, and I did not think much of it until Mouavangsou argued in this week’s reading of how “this book lacks a deep understanding of Hmong culture and therefore should not be heralded—as it often is—as the definitive book on Hmong cultural practices and beliefs” (Mouavangsou 205). I am still quite unfamiliar with Hmong culture, and after reading “Hmong Does Not Mean Free: The Miseducation of and by Hmong Americans”, I realized the faults and ignorances of the U.S.’s educational systems.

Question

Mouavangsou makes a great argument about the lack of accurate and detailed Hmong history in the U.S. educational systems. What steps would an individual have to take, in order to have the government implement more mandatory teachings about Hmong people into textbooks and teaching plans?

References

Valverde, K.-L. C., & Dariotis, W. M. (2020). Fight the tower: Asian American women scholars resistance and renewal in the academy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Christensen, T (2019). [Photo of Neng Thao of Neng Now, wearing his trademark smiley face shirt, speaking to a crowd at Hamline University]. Retrieved from http://monitorsaintpaul.com/whats-it-like-growing-up-a-hmong-immigrant-in-america/