Teach true history of America
I graduated from Columbus Academy in 1968 when it was in a dilapidated old roadhouse on Nelson Road. It was, along with the Columbus School for Girls, the best high school education one could hope for in central Ohio.
My class included the first two African Americans to graduate from the school. And yet we were not taught about the Tulsa massacre, the Green Book, lynchings or even the Klan.
We were taught that Columbus was an heroic explorer rather than a genocidal emissary of a budding real estate empire. We were taught the sanitized version of American History.
The current controversy at the school and others over Critical Race Theory (also not taught at my university) is a sad commentary on Americans' willingness to be duped and sucked in by the fraud of American Exceptionalism and the greatest-nation-onearth myth.
We should educate our children to be better than us, not our clones. We should teach them to embrace the future and the change necessary to even survive in it let alone thrive, not to worship the musty good old days.
One of my former classmates keeps telling me about this wonderful country of ours the left is trying to destroy. This is precisely the problem. If you were a wealthy, white, privileged child as I was it is easy to pretend that anyone can make it in America. Anyone can, but the odds are massively against it for the 70% that have but 10% of the country's wealth, for people of color, for women, for those unlike me.
I support the administration of the Academy 100%. If they are upsetting some parents, they must be doing something correctly.
Jerome N. Smith, Columbus