jennifer-roberts When you’re in the market for a new car there’s usually a mental or physical checklist you complete before you make your purchase. You may consider things like the type of car and its cost. Once you’ve made these decisions you may visit local dealerships to see the cars in person. You will probably take your time making a choice instead of making a hasty decision that you may later regret.
When you visit the car dealership, you will walk around the vehicle to check for noticeable dents, windshield knicks and other exterior damage, especially if you are eyeing a used car. After making sure there is no obvious damage, you might open the driver’s door and take a seat to inspect the interior. As you exit the car, you might pop the hood so that you can check out the engine and other systems that are not visible from the outside. Finally, you may take the car for a test drive to further help you determine if you want to make the purchase.
Buying a car requires research and careful consideration. It also requires wisdom when assessing whether this purchase will be valuable.
After all of your careful research, I would dare say that if you love the way the car looks on the outside but discover that there is significant interior damage as well as damage to the car’s internal systems that you will at the very least have a conversation with the salesperson to find out how the problems can be rectified before deciding how and if you’d like to proceed. After all, you don’t want to end up with a lemon.
Just like no one wants a lemon of a car, no one should want a lemon of an educational experience for their children. Sadly, thousands of school systems across the nation have failed miserably when it comes teaching the truth about the African American experience as part of American History.
There is a version of American history at every level of public education that has been cleaned up and paraded before parents and students. On the surface, the history class appears attractive and passable but when parents and educators choose to take an honest look at the history that is being taught, they see that the internal features are defective. The foundational elements that help students understand American History have been tampered with rendering them dysfunctional.
Most people wouldn’t purchase a car with a faulty engine or a broken transmission unless maybe they knew that they could fix the damage themselves or knew of someone who could assess and repair the damage.
The losers in this situation are unsuspecting students who become comfortable, passive participants in a world run on faulty systems and concealed secrets.
When a student graduates from high school without a full and accurate understanding of American history and how the oppression of African Americans contributed (and still contributes) to the advancement of white Americans, they are ill-prepared to be effective agents of change in the world.
A white person does not have to intentionally be racist to participate in national systems that are systemically racist. For instance, if a white man graduates from college and secures a leadership position at an organization that employs very few African Americans and no African Americans in leadership positions but does not understand how this is possible, he/she may think nothing of the disparity. He may not even give the lack of racial diversity a second thought.
However, if the same employee was taught accurately and truthfully about the legal enslavement of African Americans for 246 years, Jim Crow Laws that oppressed African Americans, housing laws that prevented black people from securing loans and owning homes, educational laws that bullied black people out of an education and workforce practices that intentionally employed blacks in the most menial and dangerous of tasks for the lowest pay, that new hire would be in a better place to understand why everyone around the board room table looks like him. He could be empowered to help change the culture of the organization and its hiring traditions.
Information is power. Parents and educators have a responsibility to teach children the truth. This duty doesn’t fall away just because someone deems the content valuable, irrelevant, or difficult.
Lower Dauphin High School in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania boasts a student population of 4,000 students. Among many of the classes offered to its high school students is College Prep Calculus.
This class is divided into six units, one of which is Logarithmic, Exponential and Transcendental Functions. According to the class’s synopsis, “This high school level course is designed to give the student the skills to use calculus in sciences, social sciences and business applications. It also provides an excellent foundation for further work in calculus. Students are required to have a graphing calculator for this class.”
The course description goes on to list three essential questions that the students will explore during the school year: “How do we take derivatives and integrals of natural logs and exponential functions? How do we take derivatives and integrals of functions with bases other than e? How do we take derivatives and integrals of hyperbolic trigonometric functions?”
The overview also lists features of the class such as content/key concepts, key vocabulary, standards, learning activities/resources and evidence of learning.
I am 43 and do not have the slightest idea how to take derivatives and integrals of natural logs and exponential functions. No one has ever asked me to take the take derivatives and integrals of hyperbolic trigonometric functions. I honestly don’t think I will ever need this information to function effectively in a global society. Personally, I find Calculus of little value, irrelevant and difficult and I’m sure that I can find some other people who share my viewpoint.
So why is this class even offered? I’ll tell you why. It’s because someone or a team of people with decision making power deemed the information valuable, relevant and teachable. Someone made the subject a priority and placed value upon students learning it. Someone created an entire class about the subject, attached standards to it and paid a math teacher to teach it.
Certainly, if school systems can identify and hire qualified teachers to teach College Prep Calculus, a subject that some may call challenging or even difficult, surely school systems can identify and hire qualified teachers to teach accurate and truthful American history if they deemed it valuable.
If a teacher can divide higher level mathematical concepts into digestible bites without sacrificing the integrity and accuracy of the content, surely a qualified American history teacher can do the same with content that applies to each student in the classroom.
In my decades of working with students, I have observed that most students want to learn and are open minded. I have also observed that it’s usually not the students who don’t want to learn the whole truth about American history; the pushback generally comes from uncomfortable parents and educators who have deemed full, accurate and truthful history of little to no value.
So, what do our students get instead of a fully functioning American History education that serves all students and tells the truth? They get a lemon of an education that has been white-washed to make white Americans feel good. This system is flawed, ineffective and causes significant problems for all stakeholders. I don’t want a lemon of an education for my children, and you shouldn’t either.
