Resolved: Public schools ought be required to teach LGBT history and issues

Contention 1: Learning requires the full comprehension of the natural world and society. The purpose of the public school system and education therein is to create a class of well-informed and educated citizens aware of their surrounding environment in the natural world and society, which include humanities, mathematics, and sciences. To exclude LGBT issues in this scope would be counterintuitive to the general purpose of education. Sub-point 1a: Full knowledge of history serves the purpose of history, warranting the need for knowledge on LGBT history. The American Historical Association elaborates on the necessity of history: "In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. .. Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. .. The importance of history in explaining and understanding change in human behavior is no mere abstraction. Take an important human phenomenon such as alcoholism. Through biological experiments scientists have identified specific genes that seem to cause a proclivity toward alcohol addiction in some individuals. This is a notable advance. But alcoholism, as a social reality, has a history: rates of alcoholism have risen and fallen, and they have varied from one group to the next. .. History is indispensable to understanding why such changes occur. And in many ways historical analysis is a more challenging kind of exploration than genetic experimentation. Historians have in fact greatly contributed in recent decades to our understanding of trends (or patterns of change) in alcoholism and to our grasp of the dimensions of addiction as an evolving social problem. " A full or broad knowledge of history aids to serve the purpose, and not only this, but also provide an objective analysis by students themselves on LGBT issues in society. Such would be achieving the purpose of history. Sub-point 1b: The need for knowledge on the homosexual community is warranted. There are many facts and fictions in the scope of the homosexuality and the nature of homosexuality itself needing overview in order to get a fair and balanced picture of what encompasses the homosexual community. Such speculations include that homosexuality is an illness, homosexuality itself is dangerous, etc. While some may be true and some may be false, a curriculum focused on the LGBT community will help to clear up some of the speculations that are false. Such false speculations have prompted discrimination and bullying against the gay community, which has become rampant in society: Sexual orientation is certainly one of the largest reasons for bullying in the United States: "According to GLSEN’s 2009 National School Climate Survey, which polled more than 7,000 self-identified gay and straight students between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one from all fifty states and the District of Columbia from 2008 to 2009, 61 percent of all students felt unsafe at school because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation whereas only 9.8 percent of all students felt unsafe because of their gender and 7.6 percent of all students felt unsafe because of their race or ethnicity (Kosciw et al. 2010). " The methodology of this survey, by the way, is legitimate considering the largeness of the sample and how widespread it is throughout the United States, but the actual population size of the United States is still 10 times larger than the sample size. Other surveys conclude the idea that this is a problem: "LGBT youth regularly face insidious verbal and physical abuse. A recent nationally representative survey of LGBT teens by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) found that 84.6% of those surveyed had been verbally harassed, 40.1% had been physically harassed (pushed or shoved), and 18.8% had been physically assaulted (punched, kicked, or injured with a weapon) because of his or her sexual orientation in the past year. " The effects that come from such bullying are incredibly negative: "The detrimental impact of this climate is apparent in the host of negative outcomes that attend gay youth: LGBT children and teenagers report dramatically higher levels of depression and anxiety, as well as decreased levels of self-esteem relative to their heterosexual peers. Of course, gay students are not inherently more likely to experience mental and physical harm; rather, it is “a direct result of the hatred and prejudice that surround[s] them. ”Contention 2: Mandates on LGBT teaching in public schools are justified. Any sort of blotting out of homosexuals in the context of history or issues taught in American schools is nothing more than discrimination against the gay community in addition to the idea that it depicts LGBT groups as second-class citizens for the reasons that their issues are not made requirement in the context of learning in schools.