Miseducating the American population
The noise that is being made about Black history sounds so inhumane and strange because we are actually speaking of America’s history.
All of my years in school and beyond, history was taught to me and by me. According to most state curricula, every child has to have history classes before graduating from high school. My question is how should that history be labeled? For Whites only or about Whites only? If readers are following the “cleansing” or the “clearing” of books from the shelves, most of the books being removed are those written by and about people who are non-white. How does one individual feel comfortable in his own humanity making that request?
Years ago, Carter G. Woodson wrote a book called “The Mis-education of the Negro.” Now with the outlandish discussions and activities taking place in the educational arena, in the future, many books will be written about the miseducation of all America’s people not just the Negro.
Knowing our own history, or the history of our culture, is important because it helps us to know who we are while molding the future and paving the way for those coming behind. Being familiar with past events gives us the ability not only to learn from past mistakes but also from successes. To me, the omission of any group from history teachings results in a limited understanding of history’s relationship with the present and future. Know your history.
“The Mis-education of the Negro” (1933) is Woodson’s most popular classic work of Black social criticism. Woodson was most concerned that Black history is known by all
Americans. He worked with political officials in order to get a week placed on the calendar to study Black history. For many years, Black History Week was celebrated during the month of February. Woodson concluded that it was — and is still — a glorious history to be celebrated by all Americans. He made another move with the help of others and began to call for the celebration to be held for a month, all to no avail until 1976 when February was named Black History Month.
He gathered his information from the writings of other well-known historians. Because of the limited number of books published on the subject, he examined memoirs, and slave narratives and used this information for his arguments to justify having everyone study the history of the other Americans.
Woodson did not want the teaching of Black history to be a separate course; his desire was for it to be integrated into the curriculum outlined for all students. I agree with that philosophy because when it is taught as a separate unit that is to make it less important than all history. It becomes a take-it-or-leaveit subject.
Having taught in the local public schools, I can stand on the truth of his conclusion. When I was in the local system the Black History courses were written as major subjects to be taken by all, but my coworker Martha Patton and I did not have control of the scheduling. The seven classes written up by us were placed in the scheduling, but the students were not encouraged to choose them because these BH courses were considered electives. After 6 years of being placed on the list of courses to be offered, they eventually got dropped or removed from the course offerings.
Woodson was a student most of his life, and therefore he was able to use his personal experiences in his book as well as his acquired knowledge from his reading. He often addressed this issue by explaining why it was in the White community’s best interest to suppress Black voices, and how they accomplished this by telling history selectively. In his own words:
“It was well understood that if by the teaching of history, the white man could be further assured of his superiority and the Negro could be made to feel that he had always been a failure and that the subjection of his will to some other race is necessary the freedman, then, would still be a slave. If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself.”
In Woodson’s books and other critiques, he does not just point out the negatives, but he writes about solutions to the problems he identifies. Many historians come up with problems but many times cannot help with the solutions. Read Woodson’s book for both problems created by the system of neglect and solutions.