Education For Life Academy
Where Black History Lives!
The Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Curriculum
"Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Changes" (7-10 min)
Video & Lyrics: You Must Learn by KRS One (10 min)
News Clip: Mother Outs Textbooks That Call Slave Trade Worker Migration Instead (10 min)
Recommended Article: Washington Post: "Proposed Texas textbooks are inaccurate, biased and politicized, new report finds" (30-45 min)
Class Overview
Class 4: The Struggle Continues…The Ongoing Battle Against Racist
Propaganda & Miseducation
After completing this lesson, students
will be able to:
Despite fighting for over a century to counter the racist propaganda in education and popular culture, African Americans and other minorities remain targets of educational whitewashing and historical propaganda. Students of all races are given a Eurocentric curriculum that excludes or minimizes the contributions of other peoples and cultures in the world. In addition, the school system fails to fully incorporate a diverse administration and teaching faculty. As of 2011, a whopping 84% of all public school teachers in the U.S. were white. As a result, many students of color become disinterested and alienated from school, which often translates low academic achievement, high dropout rates and disruptive behavior. Yet this resistance to biased school curricula is often misinterpreted as reckless disregard for education and proof of black/minority intellectual inferiority.
Beginning in 2010, conservatives and Republicans across the country led by states like Texas, Arizona and Colorado, began an aggressive campaign to rewrite American history books to reflect their political ideology. In 2010, a conservative Christian minister who helped lead this charge stated, “We’re in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it.” The results of their efforts have been largely successful. Arizona has banned all “ethnic studies” courses that the state claims, “promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” Yet the glaring fact that the current curriculum is designed for white Americans and promotes the supremacy of Europe and America goes arrogantly ignored.
In Colorado, Republicans attempted to ban or cease funding of the national AP History curriculum unless it modified the language to greater embrace conservative ideology. The teachers and students (virtually all white) staged a walkout in protest. Yet the National Board, the company that administers the AP History tests, capitulated to the conservative demands and revised its curriculum. Even more troubling is the blatant distortion of American and world history in states like Texas. A recent Washington Post article (July 2015) reported:
Five million public school students in Texas will begin using new social studies textbooks this fall [2015] based on state academic standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.
Read/View the following materials:
- Identify modern forms of bias and propaganda in public education and the efforts to combat them.
- Recognize the role politics play in the development of public school curricula.
- Analyze and critique liberal and conservative views on what should be taught in an American history curriculum.
"Black History cannot help but be politically oriented, for it tends towards the total redefinition of an experience which was highly political. Black History must be political, for it deals with the most political phenomenon of all, the struggle between the master and the slave, between the colonized and the colonizer, between the oppressed and the oppressor...all histories of peoples...are shaped by political and ideological views."
- Vincent Harding
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Intro Unit: The Politics of Education – Enlightenment or Propaganda?
