Billy_Kinetta
Paladin of the Lost Hour
- Mar 4, 2013
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I'm not making excuses for slavery or for the Native Americans who warred with the invaders from Europe. We are humans, and we have been finding reasons to kill each other and treat each other like shit since we dropped out of the trees.That's not how I teach. I lay out the facts and then if they want, we have a conversation about it.I'm tasked with developing courses in American History, World Cultures and Government. I'm going to tell the good and the bad. We are special for what we aspire to and shitheads for what we sometimes allow ourselves to do. How to do research and sifting fact from bias will be the most important things I teach, much more than the year Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin.
A lot of the past can't be judged by today's standards. It just isn't the same world. If you do that, you are doing a huge disservice to your students. You can consider a practice wrong today, but in context of the people and times accepted then.
You can lay out all the facts you like, but if they are not viewed within the context of their times but instead filtered through 21st Century mores, whether by you or your students, a false picture results.
I do want to remind you that there were quite a few people in this country who back in the day did NOT agree with slavery.
Indeed, and a good example. The Republican Party was formed in part to defeat slavery, and did. The Democrats started a war to, among other things, retain it. Do you make that clear to your students when discussing such matters?
How about extrapolating the events of modern history with those times and illustrate the direct line between the black-to-white slavery favored by those period Democrats, and today's modern Democrats and their constant efforts via their adoption of Socialism to discard the Constitution and replace it with the slavery of all to the State?
I mean, your students might actually learn something useful.