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The failure of American public schools to teach children the truth regarding our history

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southernhybrid

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I debated about where to put this thread and considered adding to the one on Critical Race Theory, but since this is highly political and mostly associated with the Red states in the country, I decided to put it here. If mods think it belongs somewhere else, feel free to move it.

I'm giving a rather long article that gives many examples of how teachers are being silenced by parents and politicians when it comes to teaching things like Women's Rights, Slavery, Racism etc.

Please read it if you want to comment. I'll quote some examples from the article.

https://wapo.st/3mvp6uL

Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on the New York Police Department’s use of force, analyzed by race.
These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, as they face pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination and administrators wary of controversy, as well as a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.

“I felt very bleak,” said Lisa Childers, an Arkansas teacher who was forced by an assistant principal, for reasons never stated, into yanking Wollstonecraft’s famous 1792 polemic from her high school English class in 2021.
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The quiet censorship comes as debates over whether and how to instruct children about race, racism, U.S. history, gender identity and sexuality inflame politics and consume the nation. These fights, which have already generated at least 64 state laws reshaping what children can learn and do at school, are likely to intensify ahead of the 2024 presidential election. At the same time, an ascendant parents’ rights movement born of the pandemic is seeking — and winning — greater control over how schools select, evaluate and offer children access to both classroom lessons and library books.
In response, teachers are changing how they teach.
Click to expand...

There's a lot more examples in the article. I find this frightening. When I was a child, I wasn't taught all of the horrors of American history, but at least I was taught that slavery was wrong. Your thoughts.
 
What may be needed is a site, American History Online. With all these banned historical facts can be accessed to correct the omissions and lies. So conscientous parents can have a chance to fight Orwellian conservatism. Part of these important histories is not the catalogue of horrors and wrongs done in the past, but how these wrongs were often corrected, and the fact that some things needing correction need to have continuing efforts to correct.

It used to be "Banned in Boston" guaranteed good sales for a book. Make "Banned in Florida" the same. Politically driven censorship of true facts is evil.
 
History is complicated due to its issue with high resolution. The more you look into a subject, the more there is to see. You can get lost in it. 400 or so years is a long time to study. And with all the layers and context, I can't even imagine designing study plans for history. It becomes even more difficult because the subjects themselves often require a level of maturity and growth to understand the issues. Kind of like trying to explain the Holocaust to 7 year olds.

I'm not going to rule that a curriculum is deficient because of a number of things that aren't taught. A curriculum needs to be judged in the aggregate for what is taught.

The issues at hand are in areas where states are passing laws that are needlessly meddling with teachers and curriculum, at best, and more likely intentionally restricting the access to specific information.
 
It's not only American history that is censored and distorted, but also European and world history. E.g., they ban the fact that Napoleon in Egypt shot off the nose of the Sphinx with his cannon. It's a travesty that these important facts are suppressed by our prejudiced educators.
 
southernhybrid said:
I debated about where to put this thread and considered adding to the one on Critical Race Theory, but since this is highly political and mostly associated with the Red states in the country, I decided to put it here. If mods think it belongs somewhere else, feel free to move it.

I'm giving a rather long article that gives many examples of how teachers are being silenced by parents and politicians when it comes to teaching things like Women's Rights, Slavery, Racism etc.

Please read it if you want to comment. I'll quote some examples from the article.

https://wapo.st/3mvp6uL

Excerpts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Passages from Christopher Columbus’s journal describing his brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples. A data set on the New York Police Department’s use of force, analyzed by race.
These are among the items teachers have nixed from their lesson plans this school year and last, as they face pressure from parents worried about political indoctrination and administrators wary of controversy, as well as a spate of new state laws restricting education on race, gender and LGBTQ issues.

“I felt very bleak,” said Lisa Childers, an Arkansas teacher who was forced by an assistant principal, for reasons never stated, into yanking Wollstonecraft’s famous 1792 polemic from her high school English class in 2021.
Click to expand...

The quiet censorship comes as debates over whether and how to instruct children about race, racism, U.S. history, gender identity and sexuality inflame politics and consume the nation. These fights, which have already generated at least 64 state laws reshaping what children can learn and do at school, are likely to intensify ahead of the 2024 presidential election. At the same time, an ascendant parents’ rights movement born of the pandemic is seeking — and winning — greater control over how schools select, evaluate and offer children access to both classroom lessons and library books.
In response, teachers are changing how they teach.
Click to expand...

There's a lot more examples in the article. I find this frightening. When I was a child, I wasn't taught all of the horrors of American history, but at least I was taught that slavery was wrong. Your thoughts.
Click to expand...
Is there anyone in the US in 2023 who doesn't think slavery in the US was wrong? Maybe a crazy person here or there. I think the lady in the video was just being cautious with regard to teachers making moral judgement regarding various US actions over the years, even though slavery is a bit of a no brainer. There are other aspects of history where its not quite so clear cut, for example the US dropping nuclear bombs on Japan to end WWII. A case can be made for that being wrong, or the being the right, albeit horrendous thing to do at the time. In that case, I think the teacher would be wise to open that question up for discussion in the class, but probably should refrain from taking a stance that that was the wrong thing to do.
 
thebeave said:
Is there anyone in the US in 2023 who doesn't think slavery in the US was wrong? Maybe a crazy person here or there. I think the lady in the video was just being cautious with regard to teachers making moral judgement regarding various US actions over the years, even though slavery is a bit of a no brainer. There are other aspects of history where its not quite so clear cut, for example the US dropping nuclear bombs on Japan to end WWII. A case can be made for that being wrong, or the being the right, albeit horrendous thing to do at the time. In that case, I think the teacher would be wise to open that question up for discussion in the class, but probably should refrain from taking a stance that that was the wrong thing to do.
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There is a strong vocal segment of parents who would object to bringing up the subject of the USA dropping nukes on Japan because they would view as anti-American even if the fact was brought up at all. Just like there is a strong vocal segment of parents who object to educators bringing up that many of our founding fathers owned slaves.
 
thebeave said:
Is there anyone in the US in 2023 who doesn't think slavery in the US was wrong?
Click to expand...
There are plenty of people in the US in 2023 who think that slavery in the US is an entirely historical fact, with no relevance to how people in the US live today.

And those people are sorely in need of an education in the history of slavery and its consequences, direct and indirect, for the present day.
 
There are groups of people who don't think that slavery was wrong or that it wasn't that bad. I don't know if I can find it, but there's a crazy evangelical pastor who has preached that the slaves were brought here by god so they could become Christians and be "saved" from hell.

Sadly, there have been many extreme groups that think that slavery wasn't that bad at all. Plus, from what I've read, a lot of schools, especially in red states don't want the poor little white children to know the history of Jim Crow etc. From what I've read, it's not the white children who are against learning about the things some of their ancestors did, it's the parents of these kids that object to their children learning these things. It's crazy.

I went to elementary school in NJ, where there is a large Italian population. We were taught that Columbus was some great man who discovered America. The truth is that he abused Native Americans. One of the examples in my linked article describes how a teacher who gave examples from the journal of Columbus was criticized by a parent for making her white son feel guilty. Seriously. I wish I had been taught the truth about Columbus, instead of the BS I was taught as a child. Shouldn't we want to be teaching our children the truth? It's not supposed to make anyone feel guilty. It's supposed to help us learn and think more critically and not believe some BS about the history of our country.

From the link:

For 14 years, a North Carolina social studies teacher taught excerpts of Christopher Columbus’s journal without incident. The point was to show how Columbus’s marriage of enslavement with his quest for profit helped shape the world we live in today.
The teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of harassment, directed children to the first chapter of Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” titled “Columbus, the Indians, and Human Progress.” Throughout the chapter, students encountered paragraphs taken from the explorer’s journal in which Columbus delineated his views of, and interactions with, the Native peoples of America.
“As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force,” Columbus wrote in October 1492, in a slice of the journal quoted by Zinn. “They would make fine servants. … With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want,” he also wrote.
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But last school year, when the North Carolina teacher tried to give this lesson to her sophomore honors world history class, a parent wrote an email complaining that her White son had been made to feel guilty.
The teacher recalled replying by asking, “Why would your child feel guilty about what Columbus did to the Arawak?” The parents of the student escalated the issue to human resources, the teacher said, spurring an administrator to warn that she needed to stop “pushing my agenda — telling me that having my children learn the truth about Columbus was biased.” Soon after, she said, New Hanover County Schools placed an admonitory letter in the teacher’s file and ordered her to halt the lesson on Columbus.
Click to expand...
 
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Yeah, we should teach the truth. If little Johnny needs a pat on the head, give him a pat on the head. But teach the truth.

Not doing so is really bad. The truth rules, and the little snowflakes need to learn that fact - the easy way or the hard way.
 
Another big problem is that what's happening is causing some of the best teachers to leave the profession. They want to teach the truth. They want their students to think more critically, but parents and administrators in some cases are denying them their right to teach the truth and to encourage their students to discuss controversial things in the classroom, things that sometimes involve sexism and racism.

I read the book "White Rage" a few years ago, a well written book about the history of racism in the US, including how Black people were treated when they fled to the North. The book didn't make me feel guilty. It made me angry that a group of people were treated so harshly simply due to the color of their skin.

Once when I was trying to learn more on my own by reading a variety of articles online, I saw a sign that had been posted in Boston in the earlier part of the 20th Century, that read, "No Irish. No Blacks. No Dogs." My great grandmother was an Irish immigrant who I'm pretty sure lived in Boston before moving to NJ. It made me realize how much hatred there has always been toward many groups of immigrants. Shouldn't we want our children to learn about these things?
 
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It is not just failing to tell the truth about slavery. It is also failing to tell the truth about the horrors of reconstruction. The rise of Jim Crow. Lynchings. Systematic attempts to prevent American blacks the right to vote. Red summer of 2019. The rise of Civil Rights campaigns.

Centuries of racism has resulted in a permanent black underclass. The right does not want to discuss this. Or how to long term, dig the U.S. out of 3 centuries of evil stupidity. To teach today's children to notice and hate such stupidity.
 
There are other areas where racism was an issue as well. There is a Chinese museum in NYC that has exhibits about the discrimination Chinese people faced in the US over the years they have lived here. These things are also never taught. Cheerful Charlie is quite correct in commenting that the Right Wing none of this to be exposed to students in schools so that it can be swept under the rug as if it does not exist, and be unknown and forgotten.
 
bilby said:
thebeave said:
Is there anyone in the US in 2023 who doesn't think slavery in the US was wrong?
Click to expand...
There are plenty of people in the US in 2023 who think that slavery in the US is an entirely historical fact, with no relevance to how people in the US live today.

And those people are sorely in need of an education in the history of slavery and its consequences, direct and indirect, for the present day.
Click to expand...
I don't mean to derail my own thread, but I've read that Australians have done some horrible things to the indigenous people of Australia, including in modern times. As far as you know, is the true history of Australia being taught in your country these days? I'm just asking because it's sort of related and I have wondered if this is just an American problem or if it's common in other first world countries to deny their own history of treating certain groups of minorities and indigenous people horrifically.

Since you are a native of the UK, perhaps you have an opinion on how history was taught when you were a child. After all, it was Europeans who brought the slaves to America, long before we were even a country. Does Europe teach their children about its own dark history or is it "whitewashed" so that people can pretend their countries never were involved in the slave trade etc.

I think a lot of teachers in the US have been trying to teach the truth, at least in recent years, until this backlash started by the MAGA types, as well as overly protective parents who are so scared of their little white children being emotionally hurt. Do you know if anything like that has happened in England or Australia, since there has been a conservative wave in more so called Democratic countries, other than the US?
 
I question whether it should be described in all its graphic detail. I don't know to what extent it's been vetted but I've read some pretty horrid things about Columbus, as I'm sure there is much more to go around regarding slavery, American Indians, Chinese, etc. Is it enough to say they were killed or is that whitewashing it? And at what age is it appropriate? I mean some of this shit is disturbing for anyone to read about.
Also as we look further back in history, was it not widely held that all peoples were not created equal? For proper context, can this be instilled within the student?

I don't think the details need be drawn out for any minor beyond "murdered" and "tortured". As we age we all become aware of the cruelties people have and do inflict on one another forever and ever.
 
For slavery in America blamr Pope Nicholas V. When Portugul sent ships to West Africa to get in on the African trade, that meant gold, ivory and slaves. The first Portuguese expedition in 1441 kidnapped 11 people as slaves. On return they asked the Pope to make this slave trade legal. Nicholas not only did so, but commanded the Portugeuse king to desttoy Saracen nations, Pagan nations, to despoil them of movable goods and subject them to perpetual servitude as enemis of God and Christ. See the papal bulls Dum Diversas and Romanus Pontifex for details. 1542 and 1545.
Portugul exported 11 million slaves to Brazil. Here is the start of the institution of slavery in the New World. Later Popes reiterated Nicholas V's bulls. Later Popes would eventually outlaw slavery, though in South America that did not take. Mexico and Central America shifted to the ecomienda system, feudalism, then the hacienda system. More of the same.
 
I think it should be age appropriate. Small children should be taught what happened ,but without value judgements.
 
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