The New York Times continues its challenging series 1619 today with an article on the misteaching of slavery in American schools. You can find the article here. Below are a few excerpts:
In the preface to “The Geographical Reader for the Dixie Children,” Marinda Branson Moore, a teacher who founded a girls’ school in North Carolina, noted that she wanted to teach children about the world without it going over their heads. “The author of this little work, having found most of the juvenile books too complex for young minds, has for some time intended making an effort to simplify the science of Geography,” she wrote. “If she shall succeed in bringing this beautiful and useful study within the grasp of little folks, and making it both interesting and pleasant, her purpose will be fully accomplished.” The book was published in 1863, the same year as the Emancipation Proclamation and in the midst of the Civil War. Teachers could review the lessons with suggested questions in the back of the book. Part of Lesson IX’s suggestions read:
Q. Which race is the most civilized?
A. The Caucasian.
Q. Is the African savage in this country?
A. No; they are docile and religious here.
Q. How are they in Africa where they first come from?
A. They are very ignorant, cruel and wretched.
More than a century and a half later, textbooks no longer publish such overt racist lies, but the United States still struggles to teach children about slavery.
…Think about what it would mean for our education system to properly teach students — young children and teenagers — about enslavement, what they would have to learn about our country. It’s ugly. For generations, we’ve been unwilling to do it. Elementary-school teachers, worried about disturbing children, tell students about the “good” people, like the abolitionists and the black people who escaped to freedom, but leave out the details of why they were protesting or what they were fleeing. Middle-school and high-school teachers stick to lesson plans from outdated textbooks that promote long-held, errant views. That means students graduate with a poor understanding of how slavery shaped our country, and they are unable to recognize the powerful and lasting effects it has had.
In 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit organization that researches and monitors hate groups, pored over 12 popular U.S. history books and surveyed more than 1,700 social-studies teachers and 1,000 high-school seniors to understand how American slavery is taught and what is learned. The findings were disturbing: There was widespread slavery illiteracy among students. More than a third thought the Emancipation Proclamation formally ended slavery. (It was actually the 13th Amendment.) Nearly 60 percent of teachers did not believe their textbook’s coverage of slavery was adequate. A panel made up of the center’s staff, an independent education researcher with a background in middle- and high-school education and a history professor with expertise in the history of slavery looked at how the books depicted enslavement, evaluating them with a 30-point rubric. On average, the textbooks received a failing grade of 46 percent.
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