Texas officials: Schools should teach TRUTH, that slavery was 'side issue' to Civil War

[Obama Remains Silent On Black Crimes]

Five million public school students in Texas will begin using
new social studies textbooks this fall based on state academic
standards that barely address racial segregation. The state’s
guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the
Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.

And when it comes to the Civil War, children are supposed to
learn that the conflict was caused by “sectionalism, states’
rights and slavery” — written deliberately in that order to
telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict,
according to some members of the state board of education.

Slavery was a “side issue to the Civil War,” said Pat Hardy, a
Republican board member, when the board adopted the standards in
2010. “There would be those who would say the reason for the
Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

The killings of nine black parishioners in a South Carolina
church last month sparked a broad backlash against the
Confederate battle flag , to some a symbol of Southern heritage
but to others a divisive sign of slavery and racism.

There is also a call to reexamine a quieter but just as
contentious aspect of the Civil War in American society — how
the history of the war, so central to our nation’s understanding
of itself, is presented in public school classrooms and
textbooks.

“It’s the obvious question, it seems to me. Not only are we
worried about the flags and statues and all that, but what the
hell are kids learning?” said Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom
Network, a left-leaning advocacy organization that has been
critical of the state’s academic standards in social studies.

If teaching history is how society shows younger generations who
they are and where they came from, the Civil War presents unique
challenges, especially because of the fundamental differences in
the way the cause of the war is perceived 150 years after its
last battle.

Nowhere is the rejection of slavery’s central role more apparent
than in Texas, where elected members of the state board of
education revised state social studies standards in 2010 to
correct for what they said was a liberal slant.

Students in Texas are required to read the speech Jefferson
Davis gave when he was inaugurated president of the Confederate
States of America, an address that does not mention slavery. But
students are not required to read a famous speech by Alexander
Stephens, Davis’s vice president, in which he explained that the
South’s desire to preserve slavery was the cornerstone of its
new government and “the immediate cause of the late rupture and
present revolution.”

Rod Paige, a Republican who served as education secretary under
President George W. Bush, was among those who criticized the
Texas board for minimizing difficult parts of the nation’s past.

“I’m of the view that the history of slavery and civil rights
are dominant elements of our history and have shaped who we are
today,” Paige told the board at the time, according to the Texas
Tribune . “We may not like our history, but it’s history.”

Historians acknowledge that disagreements over states’ rights
played a role in the Civil War. But the states’ rights issue was
inseparable from slavery, they say: The right that states in the
South were seeking to protect, after all, was the right to buy
and sell people.

Southern states made that clear in their declarations of
independence from the union, said James Grossman, the executive
director of the American Historical Association. Slavery’s
primary role in driving the Civil War is a matter of scholarly
consensus, he said.

“The War happened only because of the determination of the
leadership of eleven states to defend the right of their
residents to own other human beings,” Grossman wrote in an e-
mail. “The Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery.”

Hardy, the Texas state board member who said the war was not
about slavery, did not respond to requests for comment. The
board’s chair, Donna Bahorich, also did not respond to a request
for comment.

Quinn, of the Texas Freedom Network, said the new textbooks that
will arrive in Texas classrooms this fall manage to “thread the
needle,” meeting state standards while still acknowledging the
importance of slavery.

“But the books muddy things by presenting sectionalism and
states’ rights ideas throughout,” he said. “A lot of white
southerners have grown up believing that the Confederacy’s
struggle was somehow a noble cause rather than a war in the
defense of a horrific institution that enslaved millions of
human beings.”

Texas’s social studies standards are more politicized than any
other state, said Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed
state standards for the conservative-leaning Thomas B. Fordham
Institute in 2011. He gave Texas’s standards a D and wrote that
the board was “molding the telling of the past to justify its
current views.”

Stern said the social studies standards in South Carolina —
where the Civil War started, and where, in June, Dylann Roof
allegedly gunned down nine black parishioners — deserve an “A”
and honestly address slavery’s role in the conflict while also
nodding to states’ rights as an important issue at the time.

“Are Southern states soft-pedaling the Civil War? By and large,
the answer to that would be no,” Stern said. But he said there
is often a difference between state standards and what children
actually learn.

For decades, some Southerners have emphasized states’ rights as
the cause of the war. Nearly half of Americans — 48 percent —
believe that states’ rights was the main cause of the war,
compared to 38 percent who said the main cause was slavery,
according to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey.

Raul Cevallos, a 2015 graduate of Texas Tech University, said he
was taught at his Dallas-area high school that the war was
caused by slavery. But he said a group he founded to create
political awareness last year found that many young people are
ignorant about history.

The group asked students three simple questions about the United
States, including “Who won the Civil War?” for a video that
later went viral online. “The Confederates,” answered one
student. “The South,” said another. Others said they’re weren’t
sure. But the same students answered questions about pop culture
— “Who is married to Brad Pitt?” — correctly.

“If you don’t know about the Civil War, and you don’t know about
things like slavery, then you wouldn’t really be able to
understand why our society is the way it is today,” Cevallos
said.

James W. Loewen , a sociologist who wrote the best-selling book
“Lies My Teacher Told Me ,” says textbooks perpetuate myths
about the Civil War in order to avoid offending state textbook-
adoption panels. Nineteen states, including almost all of those
in the South, adopt textbooks at the state level, according to
the Association of American Publishers.

“I think we are at last seeing the de-Confederatization of
America,” Loewen said. “And I’m hoping that we will see some
action towards de-Confederatizing our textbooks.”

Loewen, who has reviewed many textbooks, said he has found many
errors and omissions that help de-emphasize the role slavery
played in causing the war. Among the biggest and most common
problems, he said, is textbooks’ failure to quote from key
primary sources: the Southern states’ declarations of secession,
which made clear that they were leaving the union to protect
white citizens’ right to own slaves.

“Our position is clearly identified with the institution of
slavery,” reads Mississippi’s declaration , signed in 1861.

Loewen identified one textbook — “American Pageant ,” in print
for more than half a century — that quoted directly from South
Carolina’s secession document. That’s admirable, Loewen said,
but the quotation leaves out the document’s direct language
about the role of slavery in driving South Carolina’s decision.

History can be a “weapon,” Loewen said, and it has been used
“against all of us. It makes us all stupid about the past and
thoughtless about the present.”

[From the Post archives: Virginia textbook criticized over
claims on Black Confederate soldiers]

David M. Kennedy , a Stanford professor emeritus and Pulitzer
Prize-winning historian who co-authored “American Pageant,” said
Loewen is nitpicking.

“I would defy anybody who read our text to conclude that we were
unaware of slavery as the cause of the Civil War,” Kennedy said.
He added that he and his co-author have bade farewell in the
past to states that found the textbook’s content objectionable.
Alabama has rejected the book for years because of what state
officials consider derogatory portrayals of 19th century
religious revivals, among other reasons.

“We’re not in the business of compromising our view of history
so some state school board will be happy,” Kennedy said.

Publishers of other textbooks also pushed back against Loewen’s
criticisms.

“Current titles for middle and high school students clearly
state that the Southern states’ desire to preserve slavery was
the primary reason for secession,” said Laura Gamble, a
spokeswoman for Pearson.


Critics of Texas’s new history standards fear that their
teaching about the Civil War will spread to other states via
textbooks that cater to the Lone Star state; Texas is the second-
largest market in the country.

But that narrative appears to be changing as digital books help
publishers become more nimble, said Jay Diskey of the
Association of American Publishers.

A spokesman for the publisher McGraw-Hill Education, asked
whether the company changes Civil War-related passages in books
used outside Texas, said the company provides “content that is
tailored to the educational standards of states.”

Stephen Wright, an eighth-grade teacher in Nacogdoches, a small
and conservative East Texas town, said some Texas students
undoubtedly leave their classrooms believing that slavery was
not the primary cause of the Civil War. But not his students.

Wright said he has his students read the Southern state
declarations of secession to learn for themselves what the war
was about. He deals with the Civil War standards — he has to
teach the standards, because they might show up on the state’s
history test — by explaining the reasons that “some people
believe” the war happened.

“Man, it’s all about slavery,” he said. “The students know that.”

Except, the students are not taught that 40% of the slave owners
in the South were BLACK.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/150-years-later-
schools-are-still-a-battlefield-for-interpreting-civil-
war/2015/07/05/e8fbd57e-2001-11e5-bf41-c23f5d3face1_story.html