"You're Right"

I attended elementary school in Columbia, South Carolina during the 1960's and was explicitly taught that the Civil War was fought, not over slavery, but over "economic differences" between the North (with its more industrialized economy) and the South (with it's farming-based economy). I learned this in a classroom to which I'd been bussed as a consequence of court ordered desegregation of the schools. The majority of my classmates were Black and this bit of propaganda was delivered by a young Black teacher doing her job. I had prior knowledge of the Civil War. I came into that classroom knowing that the war had been fought over slavery. When I mentioned this to my teacher, she answered, "You're right," but if I was going to get the right answer on the test, I was going to have to pick "economic differences" over "slavery." And so I did.

That extra-curricular "You're right" was real teaching within a system that was focused on manufacturing ignorance.

Thankfully, my family moved away from South Carolina. We moved away from the US altogether, to Athens, Greece, where I attended The American Community School, a classic international school where I attended with children from all over the world. We didn't focus exclusively on American history, which was eye-opening in itself, but one thing we definitively learned was that the Civil War was fought over slavery, and that slavery was brutal and evil. Likewise, we learned that fascism, something that had only just been defeated in Europe, was brutal and evil. More recently, I've learned from Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste that the Nazis literally modeled their own brutal and evil systems on American slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow era oppression of formerly enslaved Black people. They even rejected some American practices as too brutal and evil, even for Nazis.

I used to whine about having to learn history. "Why do I have to learn this?" I would complain. "I'll never use it." And wise adults would answer that we learn history so that we won't let the brutality and evil happen again. Even put that way, it seemed a bit of a waste. Of course, we've learned our lessons, I thought, it's so obvious that things like slavery and fascism are wrong, but apparently I was mistaken.

I know I'm not the only one who has been dismayed and outraged over what is happening in our nation's public schools, especially around the teaching of history. It's not just the state of Florida, but that is the current the epicenter of an attempt to whitewash history. Last weeks headlines were about new state standards that require children be taught that enslaved people "developed skills" from which they gained "personal benefit" by being enslaved. When the state's department of education pushed back on the public outrage they released a list of 16 individuals who they claimed personally benefitted from slavery. Outrageously, when actual historians looked at their list, it turns out that only 9 of them had actually been enslaved, 9 were identified with working in industries/professions in which they never worked, 14 of them did not learn their skills while enslaved, and one of them was the white sister of George Washington. If that's not whitewashing history, I don't know what is. What the hell else are they teaching those kids in Florida?

And make no mistake, this is not the only blatant distortion of history being taught to children in the state of Florida. It is not the only blatant distortion of facts being taught. Books that have anything to do with race, gender, and sexuality have already been removed from Florida schools.

This is, at bottom, an attempt to keep children ignorant. It is an attempt to erase the perspective of the Black experience as well as that of other marginalized people. The result is ignorance and history tells us that ignorance always leads to brutality and evil. It's already happening. As educators, truth must be our guide. 

I know that this little blog has readers in Florida and other places where the agenda of ignorance is being forced upon children. I also know that you are already planning to tell your students the truth, one way or another, like that young teacher who said to me, "You're right." Every good teacher is subversive and at no time is that more important than when truth itself is under attack.

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"I recommend these books to everyone concerned with children and the future of humanity." ~Peter Gray, Ph.D. If you want to see what Dr. Gray is talking about you can find Teacher Tom's First Book and Teacher Tom's Second Book right here. 

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