Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/21/school-teacher-assigned-5th-graders-to-pretend-to-be-a-white-slave-master.html
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I’m really hoping this is a re-Boing rather than another incident. 
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Imagine how much trouble she would have been in if she’d announced an intention to free them from slavery.
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That was my first thought too. But this is a new story.
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That said, I wouldn’t want them to promote thinking that one might realistically portray slavers as nice to their captives either. So I don’t know…maybe the whole exercise is a bad idea either way.
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There really needs to be some retraining for teachers that think this is a good idea.
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“How would you maintain discipline and orderly body disposal if you were the commandant in charge of Dachau concentration camp? Explain!”
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Yeah, I had to check the date on the story, assuming it was going to be old… and of course it isn’t. Which is making me wonder how often teachers give assignments like this, because I can’t imagine they make national news every time. (I mean, they should, but I can imagine plenty of classes where the parents wouldn’t make a fuss about it, much less make national news.)
I believe that’s part of an assignment given in British boarding schools… (I’m not entirely sure I’m kidding here - I vaguely recollect someone talking about an elite British school that involved something not completely dissimilar…)
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Slavery has never been and will never be fun. People need to stop trying to make it fun. It’s just not going to happen.
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Every time I see this it’s an elementary school. So is this happening disproportionately in elementary schools, or are we just less concerned when it’s older students?
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Meanwhile, the people who truly care about education have been very busy throughout PA. /s
Defending the Right to Learn and the Freedom to Read | Education Law Center.
Attempts to ban books are on the rise around the nation; Pennsylvania is no exception. According to PEN America, from July 2021 through June 2023, there have been more than 5,894 decisions to ban books in public schools nationally and 644 of those instances were in Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania ranks third among states with the most banned books during that period.
Glad they’re paying attention to what’s going on in the schools. 
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Older students, at least in most school systems I’m familiar with, have more specialized teachers, though of course there exceptions. Your STEM classes need people who actually understand and can teach technical and scientific topics, and successfully walk children through sometimes dangerous experiments, at least the ones that haven’t been banned yet; same with the english, history, etc. though obviously less dangerous, especially since most schools seem to have eliminated anything resembling a ‘shop’ class.
This specialization of teachers started, in my schooling, in 7th grade, though a couple of years later they moved the 6th grade into that kind of structure when they turned the Jr. High (7-9) into a Middle School (6-8) and the high school a 4-year affair instead of the previous 3 years. Elementary school, however, gets jacks-of-all-trades, often younger teachers without specialized experience or who are working on advanced degrees or certifications in order to teach more specialized classes, as well as older teachers who never did the in-depth studies to move on to more specialized classes or whose specialty is early education. And, of course, there are those who are just ‘conservative’ assholes who think this sort of thing is what’s needed to shape today’s youth into the racists of tomorrow, but I’m hoping they’re a tiny minority.
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And in fact many of the books they’re banning would be much more helpful in teaching the students what they need to know about such subjects rather than having them complete homework assignments like this.
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I don’t know. One of the pillars that keeps conservative thought standing is freedom, absolute freedom, nothing is more important than freedom. So why do they think enslaving a person is such a good thing to do?
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I draw your attention to that pesky word: person.
They don’t believe people who aren’t exactly like them are, in fact, people.
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Human rights for the right kind of humans.
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In my schools, only the sciences and phys ed/sports were specialized. Every other subject could be taught by any teacher. For example, English was taught by whoever happened to be a student’s homeroom teacher. 
Sometimes, the materials available for students to learn on their own makes all the difference.
There’s also the very profitable business of publishing “alternative facts” and revisionist history. They’ve led to generations of kids who grow up to be teachers who create assignments like these ones that make the news.
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