This commentary is by George Longenecker, a resident of Middlesex.
Some people believe teachers are demons who disparage American greatness in their classrooms. Under the lightning rod Critical Race Theory, they claim young minds are being poisoned by distorted history and literature.
In reality, what’s taught today is not much different from three decades ago when I first taught U.S. history. What’s different, thankfully, is that there’s more awareness that lessons learned have not always been applied. There are still enormous disparities in education, health care, criminal justice and wealth. Students of color have not always felt included in United States history.
One of the reasons critics of school curriculum constantly cite is discomfort. However, Americans have always felt uncomfortable about our history. Black students have always felt uncomfortable that so much of their family history has been erased.
In the years I taught United States history, we covered topics that some people would ban from the classroom today in an attempt to whitewash history. If I’d eliminated uncomfortable topics from the curriculum, we’d have had pretty short semesters.
As the musical “Hamilton” points out, the nation was founded with discomfort. Washington, Hamilton and others at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had to deal with slavery, or give up the idea of a united nation. They knew the history of the slave trade from 1619 on and could only imagine the discomfort and horror of being chained in the hold of a slave ship. On the other hand, slaves were the one of the greatest sources of wealth in the nation.
So, they compromised. They counted slaves as three-fifths of a person in counting population for congressional representation. The word slave was never mentioned. The language of that immoral compromise is still there in Article One of the United States Constitution, though the 14th Amendment made it void.
Once the Constitution was ratified, new states could be added and Americans moved west. Native people were still in the way, so the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee and Seminole nations were forced out in The Trail of Tears between 1830 and 1850, a continuation of the diaspora of native people that lasted through the 19th century.
It’s a shameful part of American history. Imagine the discomfort of being forced to leave home on foot and walk for over a thousand miles.
The Civil War and its aftermath in Reconstruction are a huge part of U.S. history. Of course the Civil War was about slavery. People who want to sanitize the story claim it was about union and economics. However, union and the economy of this country in 1861 were all about slavery.
If this country had made a concerted effort to continue Reconstruction after 1876 and right the disparities of slavery, we could have avoided a century and a half of injustice and heartache. Instead, we had lynchings, Jim Crow laws, segregation and refusal to sell property to Black citizens.
It’s a history that should make us feel uncomfortable. Critics of curriculum are right that the U.S. has done great things. From vaccines to space travel to solar power, there’s a lot to be said for the U.S.
However, we can’t use that to cancel out our injustices and contradictions. Our teachers are not demons; they’re professionals who help students learn from our nation’s mistakes. To whitewash United States history with lies to make some white people feel more comfortable is an affront to education and democracy.