Report: Schools struggle to teach American slavery
Consider this from a 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 American 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, textbook 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.”
The report found seven key problems with the way American slavery is taught:
“1. We teach about slavery without context, preferring to present the good news before the bad. In elementary school, students learn about the Underground Railroad, about Harriet Tubman or other ‘feel good’ stories, often before they learn about slavery. In high school, there’s overemphasis on Frederick Douglass, abolitionists and the Emancipation Proclamation and little understanding of how slave labor built the nation.
“2. We tend to subscribe to a progressive view of American history that can acknowledge flaws only to the extent that they have been addressed and solved. Our vision of growing ever ‘more perfect’ stands in the way of our need to face the continuing legacy of the past.
“3. We teach about the American enslavement of Africans as an exclusively Suthern institution. While it is true that slavery reached its apex in the South during the years before the Civil War, it is also true that slavery existed in all colonies, and in all states when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and that it continued to be interwoven with the economic fate of the nation long into the 19th century.
“4. We rarely connect slavery to the ideology that grew up to sustain and protect it: white supremacy. Slavery required white supremacy to persist. In fact, the American ideology of white supremacy, along with accompanying racist dogma, developed precisely to justify the perpetuation of slavery.
“5. We often rely on pedagogy poorly suited to the topic. When we asked teachers to tell us about their favorite lesson when teaching about slavery, dozens proudly reported classroom simulations. Simulation of traumatic experiences is not shown to be effective as a learning strategy and can harm vulnerable children.
“6. We rarely make connections to the present. How can students develop a meaningful understanding of the rest of American history if they do not understand the scope and lasting impact of enslavement? Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement do not make sense when so divorced from the arc of American history.
Only 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors could identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War.
Only 44 percent of the students answered that slavery was legal in all colonies during the American Revolution.
“7. We tend to center on the white experience when we teach about slavery. Too often, the varied, lived experience of enslaved people is neglected while educators focus on the broader political and economic impacts of slavery. Politically and socially, we focus on what white people were doing in the time leading up to 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.”
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.