Which they were, as it happens. But are you sure they were taught the Confederacy was bad? Because there is a long, long, long history in America of people watering down that conclusion if not outright teaching otherwise, and I must have missed when that disappeared.
It really does happen sometimes that white supremacy is the work of white supremacists, rather than the horrible evil of people failing to oppose them in exactly the right way. Honestly it does.
As long as the rest of the US seems to be indexed into Texas School Board-approved textbooks, slavery, the Holocaust, you-name-it, will not be appropriately covered… if at all
The idea that one needs to see the slaver’s side of the story is just plain silly. Some perspectives are not worth sharing. This is not a nuanced subject. We are talking about behavior considered war crimes by modern perspectives.
You aren’t going to question innate bias by catering to it. There is no “two equal sides” to the subject of slavery. There is one side of its victims and the extremely wrong side of it perpetrators.
Oh, yeah, baby! Do one on World War II now!
It’s not a prayer, it’s a loyalty oath 
I’d like to add workers’ rights and direct civic action to that list. I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but I was in JR. High when there was a huge, violent and ultimately unsuccessful strike at one of the paper mills in town. It tore apart the community. Yet for us kids living through it, all we knew was the Pinkertons beating railroad strikers and that Rosa Parks was just tired that day. Looking back, it was a really missed opportunity to help us understand what was going on, and how things work in the world.
THAT is what history class SHOULD be doing. There is certainly a way to understand the arguments of the enslavers without endorsing them. Kids tend to be more black and white thinkers, but they are better at understanding complexity than people give them credit for, more often than not. They can certain wrap their heads around the idea that people are making up justifications for doing bad things.
You are right about the zeitgeist, though you are more talking about the 70s . this was (early) 80s. In my case it was no peer-pressure experiment. No children pretended to be nazi or prisoner or whatever. No groups dynamics or anything. It was just children trying to make a ‘realistic’ 30s newspaper, in the black&white way 8 year olds think (‘in the 30s everybody was evil, so beter make it as bad as possible’).
The amount of trouble the teacher got was about equal had it been a ‘prison experiment’ type of thing, though.
I came here to mention the book that the movie was based on. Thanks!
You’re right, and I am painting with an unfairly broad brush.
Useful reminder that the people who insist on teaching “both sides” of atrocities have usually already picked their side.
Your opinion that understanding the historical context of human behavior is “just plain silly” is just plain silly. It does no good at all to tell children what is bad and good if you don’t also arm them to understand propaganda. They are then defenseless and unprepared when hit with real propaganda. Writing your own propaganda for positions you find unconscionable is what I would consider effective education. Burying your kids head in the sand in the misguided attempt to protect them from bad ideas is negligent.
Then how about putting students in a position to recognize and push back against racist propaganda instead of tasking them with creating it?
A better version of “what if they had social media in the Civil War” might have gone something like “Imagine you are living in Virginia in 1860 and you see your friends sharing tweets with messages like #slaveryforever and #confederacynow. How would that make you feel? What do you think would be an appropriate response?”
My school did something similar about apartheid in the late 80’s. They very quickly found out that the fundamental basis of power is a willingness to use force, and some of us were not willing to play their “whites only stairs” etc… game. (to be fair, not all of us “minority” kids were assigned “black”, it was a random draw with classes split evenly).
If both sides were represented in posts, I’d be willing to consider this just a really culturally insensitive project in poor taste. The fact that only pro-slavery posts were represented really makes this appear like a pro-racism school culture.
People thought slavery was evil back in the day. 800,000 Americans died fighting the issue.
People considered slavery evil in print going back to The Book of Exodus. It’s just everyone rationalized it when they were slavers.
It’s not a nuanced subject. If you want an informative and complex way to teach slavery is bad, look at a Passover Haggadah. Jewish families go through it every year. They go through efforts to place the students in the place of the slaves and to empathize with their plight.
Yep. Indoctrination into a racist mindset. And not just in the US - this seems to be a problem with whiteness as a construct all over the globe.
Anecdote: I was an English teacher at an Elementary and Middle school down here in South America for a decade. Not only do they have the children do blackface on patriotic holidays (I think most of Latin America is into this), but nearly lost my shit when I stepped into a 3rd grade classroom and saw that the teacher had assigned the tiny humans the task of creating posters about life in the 1800’s and, alongside the one about butter churns and ox plowing, there were posters explaining all the technical names of the time for the different percentages of African and Indigenous ancestry.
There was only one other teacher in the whole goddamn school who even understood why that was crap - every other one, surely like the teacher who assigned this twitter indoctrination, seemed unconscious to their own brainwashing, keeping on with the whole ‘that was how things were’ simplification.
That was near the end of my career as a school teacher. Get someone else to change that mess from within.
This.
The lie that ‘things were just that way’ (drug up for every reactionary’s pet issue) is a motor for either losing social progress made, or advancing towards ever more bureaucratic discrimination (choose the angle that fits).
I’ll return to the Song of the South movie example I learned about, in fact to my surprise, on You Must Remember This podcast: That racist Disney movie was so controversial when first released back in the 1940’s that it was screened at relatively few theaters and the protests were nationwide. With each subsequent re-release, it became more acceptable, not less, up until it became a hit movie in 1986.
People thought slavery was evil back in the day. 800,000 Americans died fighting the issue.
The convenient lie that Southern schools taught me was that ‘states rights’ was about something other than the right to own slaves. Thing is, no one fighting the war was aware of this spin, and kept on thinking the war was about slave states quitting the country ahead of abolition.
Revision history doesn’t hold up well if you read primary sources.
Yes! This is a brilliant summation of something I’ve never quite been able to articulate. And it’s certain that US schooling (at least in my day) always taught that the other guys were always the bad guys.
In 1969 (9th grade) we were each to pick “a form of government” to report on. My teacher didn’t agree with me that “Communism” qualified (apparently it’s just imps of hell or something). I had to go over her head to get permission to make that report.
I took great joy in being the well-behaved straight-A student who always chose the provocative topic.
