Sun Prairie Families Sue School Over 'How To Punish A Slave' Lesson

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3. The lack of sensitivity by these teachers is astonishing.

It’s difficult to teach about slavery in this country, but that assignment was just plain wrong. We need a national model curriculum for teaching this unfortunate and revolting part of our country’s history rather than having teachers download miscellaneous stuff from the Internet. Most history textbooks whitewash slavery while perhaps not glorifying but spending far too much time on the battles and the people of the Civil War and Southern excuses for maintaining the abominable practice of slavery. Spending more time helping children learn about and understand the economics of slavery, which really is based on feudal models of land owners (the wealthy) and serfs (the poor essentially tied to the land owner and that land), would better prepare them for analyzing history.

Using examples of slavery from ancient times just exacerbates the problem by making slavery seem acceptable because it was not just the US that allowed it. It’s even in the Bible, so it must be okay!