Parents Force School To Replace History Book With Lesson About Kindly Slave Owners

[KamaAina]

http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/uncucumbered/parents_force_school_to_replace_history_book

"The fact that this textbook was in our schools for 10 years, is a system failure.” Brooks Ames, a Brookline, Massachusetts parent.

Parents in Brookline, Massachusetts, have won a victory, persuading school officials to replace a fifth grade history book that taught students an oxymoronic version of history - fair and kind slave masters.

WHDH News reports that the Brookline school district has sent a letter to parents promising schools will no longer use Harcourt Horizons: United States History after parents complained about this passage:

“Slaves were treated well or cruelly depending on their owners. Some planters took pride in being fair and kind to their slaves.”

In Brookline?!

[jwirr]

1. Hey Parents - it is called dumbing down.

[KamaAina]

2. But Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb, has some of the top-rated schools in the country.

I repeat,

[cyberswede]

3. I believe the parents requested the *removal* of the book

Or did I read it wrong?

"There's something wrong when we teach our children that there was something good about owning another person. It's sick,” said Arthur Wellington Conquest III, a Brookline parent.

snip

The question many Brookline parents are wondering about now is how that book was used for so long with no outcry.

I think the article title is ambiguous - it should read "Parents Force School To Replace History Book that contains Lesson About Kindly Slave Owners."

[jwirr]

6. If you are correct I deeply apologize.

[etherealtruth]

8. agreed, that is my reading

The parents are outraged that such a book was in their school.

[Takket]

4. what am i missing?

It is a historical fact that some slave owners were brutal while others were, you could say, downright friendly to their slaves COMPARATIVLY SPEAKING. The overall point that needs to be impressed upon the children is that regardless of whether you spent the evening whipping or joking with your slave, the fact was they were still slaves whose free will was unjustly ripped away from them.

There is no such thing as "good slavery" but at the same time let's understand that not all slaves were treated the same by their masters.

[k2qb3]

12. Not just that.

Living in a society that condones slavery buying a slave might be the only way to rescue them from a worse situation.

And no I have no slave-owning ancestors to make excuses for.

[Arkansas Granny]

5. I wonder if this is one of the textbooks approved by Texas and foisted upon the rest of the country.

How Texas Inflicts Bad Textbooks on Us

No matter where you live, if your children go to public schools, the textbooks they use were very possibly written under Texas influence. If they graduated with a reflexive suspicion of the concept of separation of church and state and an unexpected interest in the contributions of the National Rifle Association to American history, you know who to blame.

When it comes to meddling with school textbooks, Texas is both similar to other states and totally different. It’s hardly the only one that likes to fiddle around with the material its kids study in class. The difference is due to size—4.8 million textbook-reading schoolchildren as of 2011—and the peculiarities of its system of government, in which the State Board of Education is selected in elections that are practically devoid of voters, and wealthy donors can chip in unlimited amounts of money to help their favorites win.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/how-texas-inflicts-bad-textbooks-on-us/

[etherealtruth]

7. No, it appears the parents are angry ....

... that the school utilized a book claiming there were "good" slave owners and "happy" slaves... they found the concept to be complete idiocy.

They want the book out of their school

[KamaAina]

10. But that is the sort of book that Texas would approve

Texas buys all its textbooks centrally (does the name Texas School Book Depository ring a bell?) And as Arkansas Granny points out, publishers tend to dumb their textbooks down to get Texas' approval. This would be a classic example.

[etherealtruth]

15. agree, with that

...and there are communities where ignorance is embraced. The community in the article, mercifully, is not one of them

[JimDandy]

9. That's a true statement. Is that the whole of

what was found to be objectionable? Now if this publication was trying to erase the horrors of the general conditions of slavery and the egregiousness of slavery as an institution, I could see removing them. I would have protested from day 1 myself until they were removed, if that were the case. As a former professional genealogist, though, this paragraph seems inoccuous.

The cynic in me says that the school board is replacing these 10 year old books largely because they are outdated and their useful life has ended and that this is just an added plus.

[LanternWaste]

11. Objective history requires not merely truth, but also relevance.

Objective history requires not merely truth, but also relevance implicit to the subject. One needs to validly illustrate the relevance of a few, kindly slaveholders to the system as whole, else it becomes little more than trivia in its most classic terminology

[AverageJoe90]

13. I have to agree. History is indeed a terribly complex subject, btw.

With that said, though, I can't really blame people for expressing a certain other type of cynicism, as some have here.....the RW certainly has tried to mask some pretty awful beliefs and thought processes with seemingly reasonable and erudite language over this past decade in particular.....one must wonder if they took lessons from Orwell in that regard.....

[Prophet 451]

14. The problem is...

...that the passage, in isolation, seems to imply that slaveholders were equally divided between teh cruel and fair camps whereas, in reality, the vast majority were cruel.