These sorts of things (based on the idea that things like Nazism were founded on peer pressure rather than by people who were uniquely evil) were not uncommon in the 1980s. It was part of the zeitgeist like the rather dubious Stanford Prison Experiment.
There was even a movie (I think it has been remade at least once) about the original high school Nazi experiment
I personally would have went with this Eric Andre clip but to each their own
thank you. yeah, i don’t care about the twitter part at all. it’s so far beyond the point.
in what world would it be remotely okay for anyone to be role playing “what is it like being a nazi”, “what is it like being a serial killer”, “what is like to be a rapist”, “what is like to be an enslaver”
these are not good or valid class assignments for children, and even for adults doing research there are right ways and wrong ways of trying to analyze people’s mentality -
this is not it
That movie is amazing and had a profound, lasting effect on me.
I’m not defending this - I agree that it’s not an age appropriate assignment.
I’m just seeing this as a boneheaded move and not borne out of racists intent.
That doesn’t make it less racist.
nah this shit happens entirely too much to be a misunderstanding. It’s like evrry six months we get new stories of schools writing math questions about slave beatings and writing assignments where children have to make arguments in favor of slavery. These have all been on boing boing, and I’m too lazy for sources right now, but there is a racist dangerous evil evil culture in a lot of the south AMERICA that is being passed onto children.
edit: thnks @Mindysan33
FTFY…
The article suggests that the students themselves selected the tweets “they were most proud of”. which doesn’t give us the context of why they might be proud of the tweets. And feels like a bad idea. Makes more sense to simply have them pick X number tweets from each side.
That is, of course, somewhere down the line in terms of this assignment behind “doing something else entirely”
In fact, it is pretty emblematic of the problem with systemic racism. It can be racist AF and have people “just not see it.”
This was not a peer pressure experiment. Just schoolkids making a ‘historic’ newspaper for history class.
To be fair… lots of parents are voicing outrage about the pro-slavery bullshit.
Historically, these improvised role-playing experiments tend to get out of hand and backfire.
Conducting such an experiment on a big social media platform can only make it worse (as tends to be the case with anything conducted on the big social media platforms).
I’m all for in-class roleplaying exercises, but when the topic is authoritarianism or racism or such it’s probably better not to just jump into it and “wing it”.
Thanks! I was looking, and it’s not available on any of the subscriptions I have. I did find “The Lesson Plan” - a documentary of the same thing. But I’m more interested in the one you linked to.
Every parent of that kid might have walked past billboards like this:
My school taught that the civil war was about slavery, but it also (mostly implicitly) taught that slavers and nazis and communists were Bad Guys, cut from different cloth to Good Guys like ourselves.
IMO that lie is much more toxic than teaching kids to empathise with slavers, because it’s teaching them to be the problem. Even if this subject is too nuanced for fourth graders, as long as they understand how evil slavery is by the time they graduate, they will hopefully remember this as a lesson in how easy it is to be on the wrong side.
That’s true whether this exercise was done with good intentions or not. I don’t know how much that is the case. But I do know that this story doesn’t disturb me as much as if you told me there was an elementary school that (for example) made its students pray to a flag every morning.
…In case you haven’t noticed, there are currently a lot of people who empathize with slavers (and for that matter Nazis), and that’s not exactly not a problem right now.
I think the teachers were stupid to think that there is more than one side. Is there a way to teach what happened in past, demonstrate rational thinking, and demonstrate that there are some “sides” that are just wrong?
And most of those people literally don’t understand the concept that they might be the bad guys, because they never learned to question their innate bias that the wrong side is automatically the other side.
Most Turmp supporters will have been taught that the nazis and the confederacy were bad. And they were also taught that anything wrapped in a US flag was good. We can draw some conclusions about which lesson had the bigger impact on those folks.
