What have we learned?

The American educational system is in dire need of an overhaul. Our country's future depends on it.

What did you learn in school? No really, what did you learn? Math and science were important, and perhaps you took something away from the literature you had to read. 

All of that stuff was important. But applying it can only get you so far as a person. You don’t need to look further than, say, Mark Zuckerberg for proof that being smart and good at programming doesn’t mean a damn thing for your capacity to be an empathetic and worldly human being. A thorough education in the humanities is what truly helps students grow as people. It is through social sciences and the arts that we become more aware of our surroundings and our relationships with the people around us. And therein lies the problem.

One of the most embarrassing failures of our educational system is that students are not taught the full scope of history or exposed to ideas that don’t come from sources that powerful whites have not deemed worthy of recognition. That lack of exposure severely warps students’ perceptions of the world and reinforces the existing power structures in American society. 

It’s no secret that the textbooks assigned to textbooks are sometimes woefully inadequate and often actively distort reality. But we need to be careful about falling into stereotypes. It’s easy to scold Southern schools for teaching students about the “War of Northern Aggression.” But it wasn’t in the South, but in Connecticut that textbooks had to be pulled in 2016 because they said that slaves were treated “like family.” The books had been in circulation since 2007. 

This deceit happens all over the country. It only gains notoriety when complaints reach the news. It’s as much about the lies in the textbooks as it is about what isn’t in them at all.

Social media is currently buzzing with people talking about how they weren’t taught about Juneteenth, or about the Tulsa Massacre. Those are two very important topics, and it’s almost surely not the full extent of what wasn’t taught. Another common sentiment I’ve seen all over my feeds are well-meaning white people clamoring for the emergence of the next Martin Luther King Jr. to lead the Black Lives Matter movement and unify the country. 

Apparently we don’t teach that MLK was wildly reviled by whites during his lifetime. Polling data shows that a strong majority of whites hated him in the 1960’s. Dr. King was a leader, but he did not speak for the whole country. That’s the entire point of his work. It’s why what he did was so remarkable, and why he was assassinated. 

While more Americans than ever now recognize racism to be a serious societal issue, it is foolhardy to think that a central leading figure would not become the subject of consternation from the white community. Many white liberals clutch their pearls at the anger and four-letter words being vented in the streets, claiming that they support the message but are horrified at the manner in which it’s being delivered. Martin Luther King III tweeted that his father believed that riots were the language of the unheard, and white people tried to tell him what his father “actually” meant.

We don’t teach the full scope of Dr. King’s messages in our schools. We don’t teach his more radical sentiments, such as understanding where riots come from or that he had no love for capitalism. Dr. King becomes a more whitewashed and less challenging figure both for white students and for white teachers to talk about. The same goes for Rosa Parks and countless other figures of the civil rights movement. Did you learn anything at all about Huey P. Newton in school? 

These problems go beyond race too. History classes are woefully inadequate at teaching about women’s history and queer history. All of these inadequacies are by design at one level or another, whether it be with the textbook publishers or in the school districts themselves. The inadequacies extend beyond history curricula too. So much of the literature canon taught to students is the work of dead white men, with the women represented often also being white. 

The good news is that curricula are improving in some places. A number of states now require LGBTQ history be included in lesson plans, for instance. The work is far from over though. 

I consider myself to be relatively fortunate. My school district was very diverse. I was assigned Octavia Butler’s Kindred in middle school, the year after my social studies teacher went to great lengths to explain the labor movements of the industrial revolution. My history teachers in high school were great.

The school district was also horribly segregated. I graduated from high school in 2012. There was a whole-ass article in the New York Times last year about the segregationist policies our highly liberal suburb has for its schools. White kids were shuttled along to honors classes even if their performance didn’t necessarily merit it. I got something like a C- in my junior year math class and was promptly placed into honors math as a senior. The guidance counselors looked at me like I had three heads when I asked to be moved down a level after a month. The new class was much less white. 

The excellent AP courses I took? Overwhelmingly white. 

I was vaguely aware of the Tulsa Massacre when I visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture last year. I had a vague recollection that something bad had happened in Tulsa at some point. I knew it had been mentioned in a history class I’d taken at some point. I had forgotten the full extent of the atrocities, and was stunned when I viewed the museum’s exhibit about the massacre. 

To his credit, my AP US History teacher taught us about Black Wall Street. It had slipped out of my brain at some point between then and going to the museum. We learned that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation took two years to reach some slaves, but I honestly can’t remember if the word “Juneteenth” was ever used in any of my classes. It might have been, it might not have been. I think I might have learned about the holiday on Twitter a few years ago. 

I got a good education. Not everyone in my school did. Not all of that good education stuck in my head. It’s easier for some of the uncomfortable racial matters to not stick in your brain when there’s only a couple of Black kids in your class.

And to be absolutely clear, a lot of that is on me. I was already a little lefty brat when I was in high school and I still cringe when I think back to some of the things that my friends and I said and laughed at. We were being taught about inequality, we were aware of the fact that the NAACP was considering suing the hell out of our school district because of the rampant segregation, we considered “Republican” to be a dirty word, and we were still idiots. I may have been 16, but I still had a responsibility as a human being to be better.

So how do we devise a system of education where all of the vital things that students need to be exposed to are actually offered, and how do we try to make it stick? Those are the questions that need to be answered if we are to experience true progress. We need to tell the full scope of history, not just history as dictated by white people. We need to create an environment that impresses the importance of these lessons on all students. 

These changes will be slow. They need to start now.