United States, year 2022. As of July 1, “education on sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten through third grade” or in general if the subject is addressed “in an inappropriate way” is prohibited in Florida classrooms. not appropriate for the age of the students. It’s the perfect cap to a school year that began with the ban on teaching about the Holocaust through the award-winning graphic novel Maus, which a Tennessee county school board withdrew after seeing it as “inappropriate and vulgar.” But there is more.
In a bold exercise in linguistic contortionism, a group of Texas educators recently proposed to the state Board of Education that slavery be renamed the “involuntary relocation of Africans in colonial times.”
The proponent group was made up of nine teachers and was one of many that are in charge of advising the state board to draw up a social studies plan that will affect some 9,000 public schools.
The board ordered the advisers in question last Thursday to “review” the euphemistic denomination of slavery, informed the president of the entity, Keven Ellis. The school body will continue to study the various updates to the curriculum this summer and will put it to a vote in November. The procedure follows a law the state passed last year to keep topics that “make students uncomfortable” out of Texas schools.
The suggestion about the denial expression of slavery was questioned during a meeting of the academic board that lasted more than 12 hours, on June 15. In it, the Democratic delegate from Dallas and Fort Worth, Aicha Davis, rejected what she saw as a presentation of slavery that blatantly seeks to downplay the importance and cruelty of that form of human trafficking.
Davis stressed that the proposal invited students to compare different “journeys to America, including those of voluntary Irish immigration and involuntary relocation of Africans.” A “totally unfair” comparison that would “distort reality in the minds of children,” Davis said.
But it rains on wet. In 2015, also in Texas, 15-year-old black student Coby Burren was reading his geography book in his Pearland High School class when a phrase caught his eye. Alongside a map of the US on “immigration patterns,” the text stated that the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of “workers” from Africa to the United States “to be employed on agricultural plantations.” The boy photographed the page with his mobile and sent it to his mother along with a message: “We were very hardworking, right?”, and added a sarcastic emoji. Her mother, Roni Dean-Burren, denounced the text on the networks and managed to get the publisher to correct it.
That was a small victory in a war that continues to be waged. And, in it, the Republican ultras are winning quite a few battles wherever they govern.
On the campaign trail for governor of Virginia in the fall, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin had a big hit with his voters with a video in which a mother was horrified that her teenage son had been made to read on the school the book Beloved, by Toni Morrison. The acclaimed novel crudely tells, including violence and sex, the story of a mother who kills her daughter so that she does not have to suffer the horror of slavery.
Youngkin won the elections under the promise that he would avoid those bad times for the mothers identified with the one in the video. And she did so. In April, the new governor signed a law requiring Virginia schools to direct notices to parents when their children are assigned books with sexually explicit texts, so that they can opt out of such reading.
Almost at the same time, the also Republican Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, enacted another law that prohibits the teaching of critical race theory in public schools and workplaces, which brings together notions about the history and present of inequality and racism in the country.
DeSantis says that with this law and the one recently enacted in his state to limit sex education – a law called “Don’t say gay” by critics – the “indoctrination” imposed by the Democrats ends, and the boys of Florida and their parents will stop feeling “uncomfortable” with certain sexual issues and “guilty” with the issue of racism. It is the good republican education.
