How are teachers supposed to even teach now in Texas? The state Legislature and Governor have gone off the deep end trying to close the mouths of public school teachers. What’s got them riled this time is a concept about which they know nothing: critical race theory. The problem with the theory is that white people think they know all about it, and what they think they know greatly offends them down to their lily-white foundation. So the white-dominated Texas Legislature and Governor are telling teachers to ‘Watch it!’ when dealing with our country’s and state’s history as well as current events involving racial conflict (and oppression). Seriously, they want teachers to self-censor their attitudes, word choice, sentence structure and personal emotions as to not leave any Texas school student thinking less of his or her or another’s race (especially the great white race) when delving into our collective history and government. LOL!!
This is as asinine as it is offensive to any intelligent person living today.
What’s been a-happening in the past couple of years, perhaps more so during the time students spent studying at home and more and more relying on the internet for research, is kids have been asking a lot of questions about America’s history and race relations. A 21st century student is different from one learning in the 20th century. A kid today doesn’t just read history books and gloss over common phrases we all learned, like: “slave-holding states,” “three-fifths of a free person,” “set all his slaves free upon his death,” “Trail of Tears,” “The Civil Rights Amendment of 1964,” “The Voting Rights Act of 1965,” “women’s suffrage,” “Japanese internment camps,” “National Guard shot college students protesting the Vietnam War,” “French Fries changed to Freedom Fries,” “America’s longest war.”
A kid in school today, from elementary to high school, will immediately research online any new term or time period. They do it on their classroom laptops. And alongside all the misinformation that is online is also all the truth: authentic pictures of an African American hanging from a tree, and another picture, and another one, and another one … thousands from the 19th to the 20th centuries (the names now preserved on hanging headstones in a museum); the Pulitzer Prize winning photo of the young teen crying over a slain college student at an anti-Vietnam War protest; all the Civil War photos; all the WWI and WWII photos; all the Nazi concentration camp photos; and all the validated and substantiated research confirming our history–all the same stuff we learned way back when, well, suitable for printing in a school textbook.
But kids today ask questions in the classroom while studying American history and other subjects, questions that we never asked before the internet: “OK, um, exactly why were Africans brought here as slaves? Why not people from other parts of the world?” “What I don’t understand is why didn’t the slaves just proclaim their freedom, say ‘I’m not a slave’ and just leave the plantations.”
Ah, the rub, my fellow white Americans, Southerners and Texans. We don’t want to acknowledge the ugly truth, the reason ‘why’ which young students want and deserve to know. We’d have to tell the kids, er students: “Slavery was a brutal system. ”
What do you mean? What would happen if they ran away and just started working for themselves, start their own communities?
“If a slave were caught, he or she would be punished. Some were hobbled so they’d never run or walk normally or quickly again.”
But why? Why were the people who owned slaves so cruel? Why couldn’t they just let the slaves work like all the European indentured servants who came here, like seven years or so, and then let them be free?
“White European people of the time in the U.S., the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, maintained a deep conviction that their way of life was the only proper way to live. For many centuries Western European man believed his religion, race, culture, art, music, literature and even the English language were superior to all other people around the world.”
This kind of objective classroom conversation, one whereby the educator takes great care to explain to young minds so that they understand the past, is now hereby banned from taking place in Texas schools.
The flow of teaching and learning
Texas lawmakers don’t understand the flow of a lesson, the classroom and teaching. A teacher organizes lessons by specific concepts and units to eventually cover a school year’s course like history or literature, music or science, for example. (FYI: Every school subject’s concepts were set in stone by the Texas Legislature in the 1980s.) Throughout the lesson, however, questions and conversations from students can (and should) pop up. A modern teacher would allow conversation and not stifle it. Teachers today do not expect, and school administrators do not want to see, students sitting in their desks erect and quiet. The 21st century classroom is supposed to be lively and engaging and allows for conversation and curiosity—because students who ask questions are learning.
By the way, all those blunt questions being asked about America’s documented past and current conflicts centered on race are not from African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans or Hispanics. The questions are coming from the white kids. Unlike most of us at their age—we who accepted as fact what we learned in school, like ‘Africans were brought here to be sold as slaves,’ ‘the Civil War was fought over many issues of which only one was slavery,’ the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, ‘public schools had to be integrated because they were segregated for a hundred years’—students today don’t just accept what they’re taught, no questions asked. People who are not white know their history. We don’t.
And the Texas Legislature wants to keep it that way.