Is It Okay For Schools To Teach About Race?

Is it appropriate for our public schools to teach children about racial issues?  It’s an interesting question, and, in my view, there is no simplistic answer.  I’m interested in how readers of this post would answer the question.  Here’s the bottom-line of my current thinking:

Proposed Principles

Public schools should not — indeed, they realistically cannot — ignore issues of race and discrimination.  Schools should provide a welcoming environment for all.  To do that, teachers should be trained to deal with incidents of prejudice when they arise.  More than that, proactive teaching about tolerance is a proper function of the schools.  One of the long-standing functions of public schools has been to socialize youth to be good members of society: to be honest, respectful, self-reliant, hard-working, charitable, tolerant, etc.  Teachers, along with parents and religious institutions, are an important part of the socialization process.

What about the teaching of history?  Schools should teach the facts, both the good and the bad.  The history of slavery and racial discrimination should be taught with candor.  But so should the history of the efforts to end slavery, to end Jim Crow, and to establish equal rights for all.  History should not be painted with an overly rosy brush, nor should it over-emphasize the darker parts of the overall picture.

What about discussions of current, controversial issues?  My view is that such discussions may be appropriate for more mature high school students in some classroom situations, with important caveats.  Teachers should encourage open dialogue (again, with tolerance), but they must be careful not to put their thumb on the scale of one side of such debates.  Fortunately, Fairfax County has a Controversial Issues Policy, which is intended to deal with this.   A copy of the policy is included with this post.  Controversial Issues Policy

Facts vs. Ideology

Ideology

Principles like these are sometimes easier to articulate than to apply.  What is “overly rosy,” and what is “overly dark”?  When is the line crossed between teaching the facts of history, on the one hand, and indoctrination with controversial ideology and opinions, on the other?  In some cases, there can be legitimate differences as to where the line should be drawn.  But the possibility of such differences is not an excuse for a school system to try to push the envelope.

The Controversial Issues Policy sets an appropriate standard; it urges caution “when there are substantial differences of opinion … on the local, national, or international level and when these differences of opinion are accompanied by intense feelings and strong emotions on the part of individuals or groups.”  (Unfortunately, as I will discuss in a subsequent post, the Fairfax County School Board is considering possible revisions to the policy so as to make it easier for teachers to take more of an advocacy role in discussions of controversial issues.)

Do Fairfax County Schools Adhere to Objective Principles in Teaching about Race?

Unfortunately, “No.”

One might think that the way to evaluate the objectivity of the teaching is to examine the social studies textbooks.  That was my initial thought when I began my research last year.  I became curious when issues were swirling around in the Virginia Governor’s campaign about what’s being taught in Virginia schools.  I wanted to evaluate the facts for myself, so I read the social studies textbooks used in Fairfax County’s middle- and high schools.  My first post on this website described what I found.  See “First Steps,” December 15, 2021.

As described in “First Steps,” I was pleased to find that the textbooks cover issues of race and discrimination in a thorough and fair way.   They are comprehensive in their scope, and they cover the relevant topics in much more detail than the texts of my youth.  And rather than focusing mainly on the President and Congress, events, dates, and other “dry” history, they devote considerable space and emphasis to social history — the lives and difficulties faced by common people, including African Americans, Native Americans, laborers and women.  They include profiles of men and women in various walks of life who contributed to our rich history.  Most important, the textbooks cover the historical facts objectively, without undue preaching or ideological bent.

But examining the textbooks is not enough, because the actual curriculum goes well beyond the texts.  The School Board and school administrators determine what should be emphasized in instruction.  That’s where the issues arise.

Curriculum materials in Fairfax County have been extensively revised in the past couple of years to stress issues of “race, identity, power and bias.”  This curriculum is anything but objective and fact-based.

Subsequent posts on this site will discuss in some detail what’s in the revised curriculum.  Suffice it to say here that there is a major emphasis on:

•  “privilege” and the importance thereof to a person’s success in the world,
•  a person’s “identity” in various demographic groups which allegedly create important advantages and disadvantages,
•  the existence of “systemic” or “institutional” racism created by the prevailing culture and by alleged unconscious racism by white people, and
•  the importance of power and bias in explaining much of American history and the American political system.

These topics are not historical facts; they are opinions.  And they are definitely “controversial issues,” as defined in official policy.  Therefore, any discussion of them is required to be presented “as impartially and objectively as possible,” without personal bias, and with “multiple perspectives, … gathering information and evidence, considering implications and consequences of varying viewpoints, [and] checking for assumptions.”

This requirement is being ignored in the privilege/identity/bias/power curriculum of Fairfax County Public Schools.