Uneducated and Miseducated Students
LeBron James’ I Promise School (IPS) in Akron, Ohio, which is run by his family foundation, has recently come under fire for producing shockingly poor academic performances across the curriculum. As a result, the school is bringing in a new principal in hopes of turning the situation around. In other recent news about education that has captured the public interest, Florida introduced a slavery curriculum that essentially attempts to portray the malefic institution as a largely successful jobs program with some inconveniences. What both of these stories demonstrate is that relying on school systems to produce educated children is simply asking for one’s children to be uneducated, miseducated—or perhaps both.
With respect to the I Promise School, for students to go many years without passing essential tests, it shows that the school is utterly failing to achieve its fundamental purpose. Promotional videos showing the culture of the institution (see below) discuss the importance of making the students feel cared for when they are in school. This practice is not terrible per se. However, when there is little focus on enforcing rigorous standards, students will not thrive academically. Rigor and relatability are not mutually exclusive, and every good educator should strive to have both. You do not give students high fives, hugs, and fist bumps and think they will assimilate the material from the curriculum via osmosis. Gimmicks do not produce strong academic performance; strong teaching and fostering academic discipline in students do.
Students who are taught “history” in DeSantis’ Florida will also be graduating knowing nothing, at best, or being indoctrinated with white supremacist lies, at the very worst. The Florida curriculum has been correctly criticized as trivializing the institution of slavery by portraying it as a way for enslaved Africans to learn skills and fend for themselves at a later time. However, if one reads the full curriculum (linked above, but linked here again), it is painfully obvious that the goal is to have students walking away thinking that American slavery is just one iteration of an ancient institution that was no better—and no worse—than the rest of them. In reality, chattel slavery as practiced in the Americas is nonpareil in its thoroughgoing wickedness.
First, it is a historical fact that white enslavers looked specifically for Africans who had skills in order to enslave. The idea that Africans were picked from the continent while doing nothing but whistling and swinging from trees is white supremacist fiction. It is a common white supremacist trope that Africans were strong but were incapable of doing anything of use before contact with Europeans in the contexts of enslavement and colonialism. They willfully ignore that Africans were perfectly capable of fending for themselves and using their skills to survive. Judith A. Carney’s (2001) book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas clearly demonstrates how African expertise, developed on the continent, is the reason for the proliferation of rice in the Americas, but Africans are rarely credited in history. She astutely notes:
The beginnings of African rice history are just becoming known. The reasons for this tardy awareness are multiple. The long-standing research bias against Africa and its peoples and deep-seated views within European and American culture that the development of technology was beyond the ken of Africans certainly have contributed. Belief that Africans failed to domesticate crops, a step crucial for the emergence of civilization, and their presumed acquiescence to slavery, impeded the advance of scholarship that would illuminate a different vantage point. An examination of rice history and its underlying knowledge base in Africa reveals the depth of such erroneous yet enduring legacies of the Atlantic slave trade (p. 32).
In DeSantis’ Florida, erroneous history will undoubtedly endure.
Second, there are some people who think it is a clever argument to point out that the line in question regarding enslaved Africans learning skills to survive later is not so bad because other aspects of the slavery curriculum will teach the correct history of slavery. This is as misguided as suggesting that lasagna with a little bit of arsenic added is still a perfectly edible meal. It is flatly immoral to attempt to “contextualize” chattel slavery by suggesting that the institution was beneficial to the personal lives of slaves and not a horrific and barbaric institution that, in actuality, stole the lives of the people who were part of it. As The Locke Society correctly pointed out, if you replace slavery with any other historical atrocity, such as Chinese and Soviet labor camps or the Holocaust, outrage would likely ensue if anyone dared to make such an argument.
It is a dangerous practice to simply leave one’s children to incompetent school systems to educate them. It is equally dangerous to leave children’s education in the hands of ideologues who care more about indoctrination than education. Parents who want to ensure that they have children who are armed with the correct information and not indoctrinated with fake history need to ensure that they are carefully looking into what their children are learning—and supplementing their learning where possible. Additionally, it is up to parents to create a culture of academic achievement in the home, where bad grades are simply not accepted. Without parents setting a culture of academic excellence in the home, it becomes difficult for young people to find the motivation, during a period of hormonal imbalances and undeveloped brains, to do the hard work of focusing on academics and achieving good results across the curriculum.