All of these were covered when I was in high school, as well.
~Max
Well yeah, obviously that has to come first.
Hm… the only one I got in high school (40+ years ago, in Michigan) was the Tuskegee experiment. Nothing on redlining, the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, or quite a few other things mentioned here. I had to find out all that stuff on my own. So maybe things have improved over the past few decades, in some places, but it could be better.
Wishing for racism to “magically” disappear is a rather strange reading of what I said. On the contrary, I’m confronting the fact that racists are on the attack. We have to fight back with all we’ve got. I’m saying the best defense is a good offense.
In Florida, at least, the most practical way to do so would be to get it onto the Florida Virtual School course catalog. Any student state-wide can take FLVS courses. That way you don’t run into the (surely commonplace) problem where too few students show interest in the class, so the school doesn’t offer it. Problem is, FLVS is its own school district whose board is appointed by the governor rather than elected directly. But they have 4-year terms, so they might not be beholden to political appearances over direct appeals from the educational community.
~Max
I’m not sure what this is in response to. Who said this?
I really wish you were right but the evidence doesn’t seem to support this. Many people seem to need someone to hate and/or look down upon:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” ― Lyndon B. Johnson
We’re talking about a school curriculum here and resources like books, staff, and even time are all finite. When I was in high school, I couldn’t take every course I was interested in because of scheduling conflicts, timing issues on what year I had to take the course, and just plain running out of time during the day. If you make Black Studies a required course in high school, you must necessarily cut something else out of the schedule to fit it in there. This is one of the reasons I favor a better incorporation of black Americans into the basic history courses that are already a requirement in almost every state.
Nobody wins at misery poker.
I see social studies credits in that scheme can be divided into halves. So if there’s one credit in American history, make it one half credit for the usual stuff and one half credit for Black studies. That’s fair, I think.
My concern with mixing Black studies into the general mix is that it could make it too easy to pay lip service, too easy to ignore or reduce in scope. But if the focus is placed squarely on Black studies, and made a credit requirement, then everyone would have to give it due scope and attention instead of evading it.
But that is currently politically and socially impossible. Don’t let perfect get in the way of good.
We gotta do something.
Those of us in the trenches are doing plenty. Why do you think DeSatanis took action against us? We were educating. It isn’t nearly enough, but it’s a start.
Because educators have little political power, are poorly regarded by the conservative base he seeks to appeal to, and he saw how parents in general were lashing out at teachers and school boards and decided, “I gotta get in on dat action!”
I mean, we’re already expecting educators to babysit and discipline ill-mannered kids, run extracurricular activities for what can only risibly be called ‘bonus’ pay, stock for their own classroom supplies out of their paycheck, and meet standardized test quotas while following politically-based curricula. Why not put the entire weight of solving the problem of systemic racism, too? You know what they say, “When you want to get something done, piled it onto an already overloaded and underpaid person.”
Stranger
We gotta do something possible.
Your proposal, then, is to condense U.S. History into a fall class and cover Black studies in the spring?
U.S. History teachers struggle to meet the state standards in the time they’re given already. Here are Florida’s state educational standards. Alternatively you can look at the list of standards U.S. History currently meets, here. I think it’s wildly impractical to cut the time in half while expecting them to cover the same ground. How do you solve this problem?
Work with me here. One thing I am thinking of… there is substantial overlap between the standards satisfied by U.S. History and African American History courses (compare). It may be possible to do both as semester courses - timewise - if we remove from U.S. History abolitionism, the slave trade, plantations and the antebellum South, the slavery motive for the civil war, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, racial tensions, the civil rights movement, etc. and cover all of these topics in the spring course.
However I fail to see any benefit of separating the African American history from the rest of U.S. history in this manner. It disrupts the natural flow of U.S. History as usually taught chronologically. It unnecessarily removes context from the rest of the U.S. History course - will the U.S. History course skip over the civil rights movement when describing Johnson’s presidency? Not only that, but covering all of these U.S. History standards in your Black Studies class means you lose time to cover new topics, thus defeating the very purpose of having a separate class. But the problem remains, you can’t simply cut U.S. History in half. What do you propose?
~Max
I’ve been following this thread all day, and I’ve come to believe that the battle is being fought on the wrong field. Too many kids view history - any kind of history - as a bunch of facts and dates about dead people that has nothing to do with them. The way to reach kids is through stories.
It’s a lot easier to include works by and about Blacks in the standard reading/language curricula throughout elementary and secondary education than to carve out a separate Black history sequence that fits into the “official” American history sequence.
Maybe it’s just the way I learn things, but reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in middle school and To Kill a Mockingbird when I started high school (and yes, I’m aware that both of those authors were white) not only taught me about what racism really is, but made me a lot more open to learning about the Civil Rights movement and institutional racism when my American history courses finally got around to squeezing a page or two somewhere between World War II and the space race as the teacher was struggling to get through the entire book before the end of the year.
There are a lot more literature resources by, for, and about Black Americans available now for elementary and middle school courses than when I was young, and of course, African American literature that I didn’t find out about until I was in college is now being taught to high school students.
Yeah, this is huge.
In my state, they wanted to add a mandatory financial literacy class–which, let’s face it, is a helluva lot easier a sell than adding a class on Black History. In order to make room for it, they removed a year of history/civics from the graduation requirements.
The time in school is limited.
Now, if you propose that (for example) the Civil Rights movement is part of this mandatory Black History course, what do you think will happen to the teaching of the Civil Rights movement in the American History course, which has just been cut in half?
Whatever mediocre thin-gruel job was done before, it’ll be eliminated entirely. American History will become American White History, because Black History is put in a separate course.
But having seen what an uphill battle it was to add financial literacy, I think the chances that our state legislature will agree to cut other history courses to add a mandatory Black History course is zero.
No. A thousand times no. We’ve gotta do something that will help.
I genuinely think this proposal, for a variety of reasons that I’ve given in this post and earlier in the thread, won’t ever see the light of day; but if it did, it’d do more harm than good. Even making the proposal is symptomatic of the harmful trend of White folks deciding that we should be the ones to lead the racial justice movement.
I can pretty much guarantee that The Political Powers That Be will demand that American History become American White History if there is a Black History course, just to keep things “fair and balanced”.