Report: American schools teach story of slavery poorly
Most high school seniors unaware it led to Civil War.
Consider this from a disturbing new report on how U.S. schools teach — or, rather, don’t teach — students about the history of slavery in the United States:
■ Only 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War.
■ 68 percent of the surveyed students did not know that slavery formally ended only with an amendment to the Constitution.
■ Only 22 percent of the students could correctly identify how provisions in the Constitution gave advantages to slaveholders.
■ Only 44 percent of the students answered that slavery was legal in all colonies during the American Revolution.
These results are part of an unsettling new report titled “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” which was researched over the course of a year by the Teaching Tolerance project of the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center. The report includes results of surveys of U.S. high school seniors as well as social studies teachers in all grades — nationally representative of those populations — as well as an analysis of 15 state content standards, and a review of 10 popular U.S. history textbooks. The best textbook achieved a score of 70 percent against a rubric of what should be included in the study of slavery; the average score was 46 percent.
Teaching Tolerance also published a framework to help teachers properly teach the subject, with suggested resources and materials.
The report argues that the United States “needs an intervention in the ways that we teach and learn about the history of American slavery,” which will require work “by state educational departments, teacher preparation programs, school boards, textbooks publishers, museums, professional organizations and thought leaders.”
“Slavery defined the nature and limits of American liberty; it influenced the creation and development of the major political and social institutions of the nation; and it was a cornerstone of the American prosperity that fueled our industrial revolution. It’s not simply an event in our history; it’s central to our history.”
It found that while teachers say they are serious about teaching the subject, they are uncomfortable doing so. State content standards do not largely convey the need to teach about the history of slavery and most textbooks fail to convey the reality of slavery, the report said. Other problems include the prevalence of lessons that portray slavery as only a Southern institution, that fail to connect slavery and white supremacy, and that provide no real context about slavery, “preferring to present the good news before the bad.” The report says: “In elementary school, if slavery is mentioned at all in state content standards, it is generally by implication, with references to the Underground Railroad or other ‘feel good’ stories that deal with slavery’s end, rather than its inception and persistence. Young students learn about liberation before they learn about enslavement; they learn to celebrate the Constitution before learning about the troublesome compromises that made its ratification possible. They may even learn about the Emancipation Proclamation before they learn about the Civil War.”
It says the “biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the deep, abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as ‘progress,’ as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all.” The report says: “The point is not to teach American history as a chronicle of shame and oppression. Far from it. The point is to tell American history as a story of real human beings, of power, of vast economic and geographical expansion, of great achievements as well as great dispossession, of human brutality and human reform. The point is also not to merely seek the story of what we are not, but of what we are — a land and a nation built in great part out of the economic and political systems forged in or because of slavery and its expansion. Slavery has much to do with the making of the United States.
“This can and should be told as a story about human nature generally, and about this place in time specifically. Americans were not and are not inherently racist or slaveholding. We have a history that made our circumstances, as it also at times unmade them. Enslaved Americans were by no means only the brutalized victims of two and a half centuries of oppression; they were a people, of many cultures, who survived, created, imagined and built their worlds.”
Fifteen sets of state standards were analyzed: 10 from the top-scoring states in a 2014 Teaching the Movement review of the way state standards cover the civil rights movement, and five more to add geographic diversity.
The report says that none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery and most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery, about the lives of the millions of enslaved people, or about how their labor was essential to the American economy.
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