Network Schools – Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for

As readers of this blog may note, I periodically draw from articles published by a history blog called JStor, which describes itself as “…an online publication that contextualizes current events with scholarship.”  Their articles are wide-ranging and invariably interesting reads, and sometimes are very germaine to public education. A recent end-of-year compilation included an array of articles from years past that inform some of the issues our country faced in 2020, and one of them by Livia Gershon from 2015 titled “The Racism of History Textbooks” was especially resonant.

In the article, Ms. Gershon offered examples of the blatant racism in texts before 1940, including passages that “praised the Ku Klux Klan for keeping “foolish Negros” out of government”, and the inclusion of “Little Black Sambo” in grade school readers.”

Over time the general public began to embrace the notion that these kinds of texts had an adverse psychological effect on children of color, but that notion ultimately undercut their efforts to change texts. Why?  Because “Eventually, white critics began to complain that textbook material about slavery, segregation, and Indian genocide would give white students a “guilt complex.”

I believe schools need to use history to teach two lessons to our children. First, that our ancestors made some bad decisions based on the way they viewed the world at the time. And second, over time, those same ancestors came to realize that times had changed and with those changing times new perspectives were needed. To teach children that our forefathers never erred is to imply that our politicians and leaders today are inerrant. They aren’t. To teach children that the way our forefathers viewed the world was the only perspective world having is to imply that there is a fixed and absolute truth on how to look at the world. There isn’t.