History : Teachers, Textbooks And Racism

Due to the mismatch of race from teachers to students in schools, the minority students have a harder time receiving a higher education.“When minority students see someone at the blackboard that looks like you, it helps you reconceive what’s possible for you,” said Thomas S. Dee, a professor of education at Stanford University. By having a teacher with the same race as the student, creates a bond in knowledge of the barriers that minorities have to jump through. It also lets students see that even though they might be in a tough situation, they are able to receive a high level of education and may be able to reach their dreams. In an article in the Nea Today titled When Implicit Bias Shapes Teacher Expectations, they explain that the opinion

The Civil War’s effects on America can be interpreted differently depending on time period. Tony Horwitz’s 150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War examines different views historians possessed when examining the war. With this trend in mind textbook American History: Connecting with the Past by Alan Brinkley presents a specific view on the war. Brinkley portrays the civil war inaccurately by deemphasizing of the Emancipation Proclamation, casualties , and failure to explain the war’s impact on the south; this discrepancy glorifies the war’s outcome by disregarding negative effects.

Slavery, often called the “Peculiar Institution”, was an integral part of the United States economy. Prior to the civil war, the economy of the south was based on the use of slave labor for cotton. Even though the North did not have as many slaves, it relied on cotton from the South, which was the biggest import from the United States. Slavery became an important part of the culture of the south. Plantation life became an idealized way of life. Many whites came to view blacks as inferior and uncivilized. The United States was one of the last countries to abolish slavery and many of the ideas of white supremacy still exist today. For example, in The Growth of The American Republic by Samuel Eliot Morrison and Henry Steele Commager, a textbook used from the 1930’s until the 1960’s, the authors wrote about slavery having been beneficial for everyone, even the slaves. They wrote about how slaves were happy to be slaves and treated well. They claimed that slaves became devoted to their masters and were faithfully obedient. They wrote that slaves worked less than free workers of the North. Contrary to what Samuel Eliot Morrison and Henry Steele Commager thought, slaves were not treated well, content, or devoted to their owners, and suffered from overworking and terrible conditions.

High school history textbooks are seen, by students, as presenting the last word on American History. Rarely, if ever, do they question what their text tells them about our collective past. According to James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, they should be. Loewen has spent considerable time and effort reviewing history texts that were written for high school students. In Lies, he has reviewed twenty texts and has compared them to the actual history. Sadly, not one text measures up to the author's expectation of teaching students to think. What is worse, though, is that students come away from their classes without "having developed the ability to think coherently about social

In this exposition "From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America 's Educational Apartheid," the writer, Jonathan Kozol, constructs his paper in light of the meetings and perception that he had with a large number of the still racially isolated schools in America and his own thoughts about the circumstances. In the initial few areas of his article, Kozol focuses on the racial issue that he saw with a large portion of the public schools that he visited, for example, the government-funded schools in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and so on. More than ninety percent of the students being selected in those schools are African American, Hispanic, and students of another race. Different schools that are named after extraordinary individuals, for example, MLK and Thurgood Marshall, are racially isolated schools also.

The narratives of these slaves were told to reporters in the 1930’s, a time when racism and segregation were still very much apparent. The telling of these stories forced the people hearing them to recognize what was really happening to the slaves. Previously, due to fear of retaliation, or simply a lack of care from the white people, these stories were something that had never before been publicly told. You can imagine the horror, the shock, and maybe even some guilt of the white people upon hearing the stories. A white person who had owned slaves would never have spoken of the horrible things that they had done to people, instead, if they talked of slavery at all, it would only be to tell their children how nice it was to have help, or how wrong it was. The white people in that generation had never heard such tales. The stories would have

The Civil War was generally a duel to determine the survival of the United States of America as it defeated the bid for independence by the breakaway Confederate States of America. The Civil War started because of uncompromising differences between the free and slave states over the power of the national government to prohibit slavery in the territories that had not yet become slave states. This event is very crucial in regards to my research question because it is solely the biggest event that incorporates the fundamentals of slavery and why it was so important to slave states and why they wanted to expend slavery throughout the rest of America. It delivers the audience the knowledge on how slaves were used as a force of labor and work transaction. Also it exemplifies that later on, the Confederacy weakened giving northern states the victory and abolishing slavery. The conclusion that I have gained from this research is that slavery has once helped the Confederate states with manual labor, but soon after the civil war, they’re defeat against the Northern states hindered their ability to be slave holders and their rights as slave holders were discarded and slavery was

In his excerpt entitled The Land of Opportunity author James Loewen highlights the invisible struggles of the middle class. Loewen’s chief complaint is that the segregation and exploitation of the working class has been marginalized by the American social elite and all but erased from high school history books. Mr. Loewen posits that the authors of our children’s textbooks “construe labor history as something that happened long ago, like slavery, and that like slavery, was corrected long ago” (Loewen). While it may be seen as insensitive to compare the labor movement to slavery, Mr. Loewen is joined by other authors and activists who argue against rewriting or marginalizing our history in order to preserve our “national identity”. In order for our nation to continue to excel, we must learn from our mistakes not hide them. American history has been tumultuous and rife with conflict; which has led to a shift in ideals, and thus aided in the elevation of the people as a whole – this struggle is necessary and must continue.

I want to ad just a little about my own opinion. Slavery is an institution. It ruins lives or makes them better and is not a 50/50 profet. This is the truth about slavery it happened every where not just America but only in America are people so unwilling to just let things be. An example wouldbe the Jewish ancesters were slaves to the Egyptians but their desndants don't go to egypt and demand the pyramids that they built. But we hear all the time about what the " White Americans" did to the " Black Americans" . There are colleges just for the blacks as they still call themselves the minority. And there are easier college etrence exams for the black because they are underprivlaged.

At some point in our lives, we all took a history class and learned about the Slave Trades, the Civil War and the Reconstruction Era. Whether it was in elementary school, high school, or even in college, we all got a sense of that history and happened during that time frame. From what I learned, the impression that I got from what these history books were explaining was that, first, white people went to Africa and gathered hundreds and thousands of people, took them on boats to and turned them into slaves. Then after years have passed, good ol’ President Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and blacks and whites lived equally ever after. Although these events did happen, textbooks still managed to “sugarcoat”

The intersectionality of race and racism in education and how researchers’ conception of race may affect the research methods used are best understood multidimensionally (Feagin & Elias, 2013). This means that there is no one way to understand why race may affect the research method used, the way in which systemic racism may play a role in the researcher or the individuals they choose to study, the scope of the work that they select, and the way in which they report their findings. So far this term, we have read articles and text that describe race and racism through different lends on why there are discrepancies in the literature and research.

Public education has faced many extreme challenges and obstacles historically. Based on the films I’ve viewed I think the top issues were segregation and poverty. Segregation in schools started in the 1800s and continued until the 1960s. I learned mostly about the problems with segregation in the film A Struggle for Education Equality. In the film, it explains facts and statistics about children and how their lives were like. From around the time period of 1950-1980 schools were very much segregated and only ⅗ of students graduated and 50% of them went to college. The fight for equality in schools began in Topeka Kansas where high schools became integrated. Elementary schools, however, were not integrated and still segregated. The NAACP tried to have 13 parents try to enroll their kids into white school but of course, it failed because of segregation. Linda Brown was one of the children in the experiment and that’s when the Brown v Board of Education of Topeka of 1954 was created which banned the inequality in schools. The southern states still had segregation problems, unfortunately, but the Elementary and Secondary Education Act gave 4 billion dollars of aid to disadvantaged children and around 9 years after that, 91% of southern black children attended integrated schools. Segregation had clearly gotten so much better but was a major problem for a long time in terms of public education. Poverty, in my opinion, is another major problem facing public education today. In

In these lines from Derek Walcott’s “A Far Cry from Africa,” the speaker emphasizes the natural human tendencies to “inflict pain.” Similarly, in his poem, “Sympathy,” Paul Dunbar explores pain from the point of view of a bird being trapped in a cage. It flaps its wings and tries to escape but it cannot. The bird symbolizes an African American bound by slavery and unable to escape. On the other hand, in Claude McKay’s poem “The Harlem Dancer,” the dancer feels as if

When many people think of slavery they think of thousands African Americans working hard, long hours in a field under the scorching sun only to end the day by sleeping in a dirt home; where the bed was a dirty floor or if they were lucky a wooden board

What is racism? The definition is prejudice or discrimination to another race. Unfortunately, racism is evident almost anywhere especially in a high school. Name-calling, bullying, verbal abuse – are all forms of racism and can be seen in high schools, where all different backgrounds –teachers, pupils or staff – face with negative backlash of racism. Students of different race groups find it extremely tough to bond with their classmates from other “races circles”. How damaging is racism to schools? To society?, is it all black and white or are we blind to it? In this essay I will discuss racist incidents in schools specifically in America and Britain, who are infamous for racial incidents, and how it will affect the students and any others involved in those situations in the future