I don’t agree with your premise. The details of slavery and racism have been taught in schools for decades. I think they should continue doing that. The new stuff like California’s Ethnic Studies curriculum, I think is problematic. I can understand why the right (and even the not-so-right) object to the new ideas being introduced, and it doesn’t mean they want to ban teaching slavery and racism altogether - though I daresay some might.
Sure, just not accurately, and not really the effects of racism on US culture, etc. That stuff was added more recently (say, the last 10-15 years), and that’s what white supremacists want to block.
I mean, you didn’t even go to school here and are just talking out of your ass.
A heavily whitewashed version of the history of slavery and racism has been taught in schools for decades. The left is trying to teach a more accurate and detailed version of history. And the right object to it because it contradicts their preferred - but inaccurate - version of history.
Look people DemonTree has seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Lean on Me, hell she’s even seen Stand By Me, there’s nothing we can teach her about the American education system!
I wasn’t educated in the US. The bulk of my education was in Canada. I read the article (perhaps too quickly) but like many such articles it talks about how the American education system has failed to teach American history specifically around slavery. But it doesn’t explain how it has failed. What do you feel are the most striking shortcomings of the way the history of slavery is taught in American schools. Anecdotally, I feel like the Canadian education system was not lacking on the subject. I feel like I have a very clear understanding of the subject but my education didn’t stop with the last exam I took in history class. My kids, who were raised in the US also have a robust understanding of this part of American history. So what’s been missing or whitewashed exactly in K-12 education in America?
Nonsense. Just because disagreements on several still-unresolved issues about some specific contributions of genes and environment to particular outcomes tend to split along ideological lines does NOT mean that “pretty much the whole left is in denial about genetics”.
This is a classic example of a tendency of yours to indulge in argument rhetoric relying on what I call the “Hitchens Trick” (both Christopher and Peter):
Namely, you make a ridiculously broad overgeneralization, and when challenged on it, retreat to defending a much more restricted component on it, so that it superficially looks like you’re rebutting your challengers.
Just to name a few:
- Refusal to acknowledge or accommodate student transgender identity.
- Mandatory obliviousness towards racial discrimination in student discipline.
- Defunding public education with “school choice” proposals to siphon off school funding to less accountable schools, and attacking teachers’ unions.
And some other education policy demands from the right:
- Restricting sex education in schools (they’ve been complaining about sex ed for decades)
- Teaching so-called “creation science” and/or the “controversy” about evolution in preference to science-based information about evolution (that’s another right-wing “education” goal of long standing)
- More courses about the Bible in public schools
- Slanting textbooks to give more positive views of the Confederacy and/or slavery-era America and/or capitalism (this long pre-dates the current fuss over the 1619 Project)
- Removing books from school libraries and curricula that discuss LGBTQ issues, or Islam, or differing cultural perspectives in general, or the history of racism and oppression of indigenous peoples in America
A lot of these right-wing demands haven’t made much progress at the national level simply because they’re so flagrantly unconstitutional and/or counterfactual, and because of often truly heroic principled resistance on the part of teachers and librarians. But don’t kid yourself that the right isn’t continuing to make these demands for educational changes in accordance with their ideology.
Just speaking personally, in addition to the sixth-grade teacher I mentioned above, I had a high school history teacher who described slavery as the best thing that ever happened to black people, as it raised them out of savagery and taught them about Jesus. My AP American History teacher, a deeply decent person, was highly ambivalent over whether the South seceded over slavery, and we never spent any time learning about the astonishing brutality of slavery, instead focusing on it as an economic and political institution.
There are lots of articles on the subject - some of them are paywalled (NYT, WaPO), but here’s one that’s not.
It flags a lot of the basic issues, from the broad to the specific. For example:
I’m not sure why they felt the need to include a point about the term “slaves” vs “enslaved persons”, which seems trivial next to everything else in the article, but nonetheless that’s a basic overview - and that’s for the better current schools and texts on the subject.
Consider as a less nice example a textbook simply referring to slaves as “workers”
Or “immigrants”
Or claiming that slaves were treated kindly
Or even that slavery was “the earliest form of social security in the United States”.
There’s lots of material about the why as well, some of which is covered in the above but mostly because the South won the war of the textbooks and how history was taught in many regards (the issue with Texas and textbooks is a long-known one I won’t rehash here). I note that others have raised similar points while I was typing, so hopefully that addresses the question sufficiently.
Slavery was the earliest form of social security in the United States.
Nice! Both a lie about slavery and planting the seeds of distrust for Social Security!
Say what you will about these people, but they do try to be efficient.
To note that the SS thing was from a 1960s textbook. From Alabama, unsurprisingly.
Note to @QuickSilver, based on what others showed about what the right did and continues to do with education, this is what the right wing narrative and how they frame the discussion leads to, it give us centrists like this poster that don’t notice how manipulated they are by the right’s seemingly “balanced” points.
Yup. The standard American “we fixed slavery in the Civil War and racism in the Civil Rights era, nothing to see here anymore folks, nope nope” narrative tends to suppress our realization of how in-denial some folks still are about the subject of slavery and racism.
Thanks: @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness, @Gyrate, @GIGObuster, @Kimstu - for the insight.
It doesn’t speak well for the American education system to have such a dramatic difference in the teaching of American history about slavery and racism. I know from personal experience with my own kids that they are not confused about the facts. As I said, both were educated in Virginia and both went to the same school, 3 years apart. My youngest has always been a keen fan of history and is probably better informed than my oldest, but both know the facts and not some alternative version of them as in the examples you’ve provided.
offtopic (click to show/hide)
I dunno if this constitutes a “wing” either, but this is backed up by Gallop’s 2019 poll on Americans and evolution shows as many as 34% of Democrats (n=96/278) believe in strict creationism, compared to 55% of Republicans (n=147/268 I think). Strict creationism being this:
God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so
~Max
¿ Porque no los dos ?
Why not recommend 21 Jump Street (the movie)?
~Max
Not one of the examples of school ‘CRT’ curriculums I have seen was about slavery. They were about systemic racism, intersecting identities that make people ‘oppressed’ or ‘privileged’, and stuff like microaggressions. And nearly all the Americans I have seen talk about the subject say they and/or their kids were taught about slavery and racism (unless they went to school in like the 50s). Maybe you don’t think the teaching was adequate, but there is a big old excluded middle in @iiandyiiii’s question.
Yay. She’s making the same bullshit arguments about intelligence and education in two threads now. 
She’s a gaslighting, JAQing, lying troll.
That’s because your news sources are shitty. I went to school in the 70s and 80s and missed out on all the stuff mentioned in the posts above.
And where exactly did you see these examples?
Or maybe the teaching about slavery and racism was deliberately sanitised and misleading, as the examples in this thread already substantially demonstrated.
This is like us complaining about schools teaching that the Earth is flat and you saying “Look, maybe the teaching wasn’t adequate but kids were taught about geography”. If the kids are coming away not only ignorant but actively misinformed, that’s a bad thing.