'Slavery was wrong' and 5 other things some educators won't teach anymore

[swag]

https://wapo.st/3JuN6qO

To mollify parents and obey new state laws, teachers are cutting all sorts of lessons

By Hannah Natanson

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.

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.

[Girard442]

1. But can we say "Slavery was right?"

Something tells me that that's happening somewhere.

[Bristlecone]

3. I 100% agree. Today's GOP and many in the party

Would absolutely get on board with and justify “the need” for slavery.

[LonePirate]

2. Children are not being educated if they are not being taught that slavery was/is wrong.

[keithbvadu2]

4. Is killing Jews in the Holocaust right or wrong now to the MAGAs?

Is killing Jews in the Holocaust right or wrong now?

Trumpsters wore shirts with 'Camp Auschwitz' and '6MWE' on them.

(6 Million Wasn't Enough)

[CTyankee]

5. When I was growing up in Texas in the early 1950s, I was taught that slaves liked being slaves.

They were well fed and sheltered and they appreciated the help given them by their masters in exchange for their labor. They were worse off when they were freed.

That was the story we white children got in our legally segregated public school system. The "happy slave" myth got a real boost from "Gone with the Wind." I consider it to be one of the worst propaganda film in Hollywood's history. I would be happy if it were never shown again anywhere.

[Igel]

6. Yeah, don't know anybody that says that these days.

And they say, "Slavery was wrong."

My kid got it in middle school and in high school. (Standards changed in 2018, but not by much.)

A lot of time in high school is US history from 1877 to present, where the civil rights movement and fall-out from Reconstruction's discontinuance get a lot of attention. And it's not just the negatives--Harlem Renaissance and other high points also get a dollop of attention.

[CTyankee]

7. Yep. My high school years coincided with Brown v. Board. And I learned nothing about the Harlem

Renaissance in school or anywhere else in my sheltered life. Once I did start reading about it -- and I do mean read, not skim -- I found new info in each book. No wonder it's called Renaissance-- only in the Italian Renaissance, the artists were not descendants of slaves and were supported by the countries' leaders, the Church, doges, and the very richest citizens/guilds/dukes in Florence.