school is out!! things to chew on...

my pastor asked me to read and respond to some articles about the recent decisions made in texas on social studies curriculum...

i read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/education/13texas.html

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/2695/art%28ful%29_history_in_texas

i responded.

heres what my mind spit out...

thoughts?

i responded.

heres what my mind spit out...

thoughts?

***

Public Education?

S. Wang

6.24.10

The decisions that are made in education always leave me with a brief moment of wonder. When you think about this whole situation, it comes down to this: college educated men and women who interact with adults for the most part making decisions about what information should be shared to children who come from all backgrounds—race, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic, etc. You can’t help but identify a slight feeling of disfigurement in this scene.

Putting that aside, however, I approach the situation in Texas with a broader, and what I believe, as an educator, to be the more important question:

What is the purpose of education?

What is the end goal for our children as they receive a public education?

From my experience as an Asian-American woman growing up in public education and now teaching African-American students in public education, I firmly believe education has a crucial role in students’ lives. Education is a means to pack as much knowledge into our students and provide them with skills to then make informed decisions.

In the New York Times article, Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change, Dr. McLeroy, the leader of the conservative faction on the board, states that the state is “adding balance …history has already been skewed. Academia is skewed too far to the left.” I find this mindset problematic. Decisions made by the government should not be contingent on some motive to make right something that was off. History should not be skewed in either direction. The role of education is to provide knowledge to students. Thus students should be receiving the facts of events and situations. Within those historical contexts, they might be informed about biases and opposing sides. However to mandate a textbook that has a certain bias explicitly woven into the curriculum is then to tolerate learning that is untrue and ignorant of another perspective.

Rather than pushing to legitimize one’s agenda, a state board would do history justice by promoting a policy that develops a child’s complete understanding of history and the social issues surrounding it. What do you say to a child whose ancestors were captives from the African soil and stripped to be deemed less than nothing when their textbook, or even their teacher, paints the picture that their ancestors were stupid, dirty barbarians? At the same time, what do you say to a child whose ancestors were forced to take foreigners into their homes and beat them into submission because of a society when their textbook, or even their teacher, paints the picture that they were ruthless and heartless slave masters? You can not teach slavery with a drop of justice by painting broad pictures. Further, what are we telling our children by painting only one picture?

Honestly, teaching history is a difficult task as a teacher because of this dilemma: What do we teach?!

Perhaps it would be easier on teachers if the state made it very clear what key events and people should be taught at each grade level. (But that brushes on another topic of the role of an effective teacher in education and curriculum; for the sake of the length of this, I wont go into that).

I don’t think the question of what we teach is as important as how we teach it. True, in one year you can not teach everything. A difficulty I have faced is choosing the historical events to flesh out with my students. When studying a unit on “genocide,” do I focus all 6 weeks on the Holocaust alone? Do I delve into Darfur and the Rape of Nanjing? Do I mention Comfort Women in Korea and the strife in Rwanda? Should we talk about the Invisible Children in Uganda or Pinochet’s regime in Chile?

My core as a teacher says, teach the children things that people refuse to teach them. And teach about these things justly.

I find it frightening that as a Korean-American child, I never once heard about Korea in my elementary education. In fact, it wasn’t until AP US History, junior year in high school, that Korea was mentioned in a 2 paragraph summary of the Korean War. It wasn’t until college when I was exposed to the existence of Korean Comfort Women, women who were enslaved as sex slaves to Japanese military during the Japanese Occupation in Korea.

Similarly, my students hear about black Americans probably twice in their history classes: as slaves and as civil rights activists. Who are the main characters at play? Martin Luther King Junior and Rosa Parks. Are these events and people significant? Absolutely. But their history is just as incomplete as the “conservative stamp” that is said to be missing in Texas’ social studies curriculum.

Reality is…that people are trying to control what children learn.

If the purpose of education is to inform our children so that they can then live an informed life, then isn’t there something fundamentally wrong by this approved social studies curriculum? Would it still be called a public education?

I can frankly say that I would not use this textbook in my classroom, in the same manner that I do not use textbooks to teach history. History is the events and experiences of people and nations that have been recorded. So that is what I research and locate and that is what my students learn from. They learn about the slaves who were mistreated. They learn about the slaves that were favored. They learn about the slave masters who risked all that they had to restore their idea of humanity, working against slavery. They learn about slave masters who were vehemently convinced that slavery was good and necessary. And after learning and knowing ALL this, then as scholars, we analyze and evaluate the information given to us. What my students end up thinking or concluding is out of my control, as it should be. I am an educator; not a brain washer.

In the end, we live in a country that prides itself in serving the public and providing public education for all. My students on the south side of Chicago deserve to know about their history as well as other’s histories. This impacts their formation of their identity as young men and women. Public education allows for them to learn beyond their limited experiences on 79^th and Damen. It allows them to have access to the truth of the Civil War, the Holocaust, and the trade relations during America’s Open Door Policy. And in turn, they can make a decision about whether the violence on the streets of Chicago resembles the genocide seen in Africa. They can understand that there were non-black upstanders during the Civil Rights Movement who risked just as much or even more than the African-American men and women during that fight for equality and justice. And in learning about a complete and full history, my students then can decide where respect is due and how their actions and choices impact the history that is in the making.

But what message are we sending about education when: 1. as educators, we are forced to teach a certain perspective of history? 2. as students, we are only given one side to the story? and 3. as a city, state, or nation, we promote this limit on knowledge?