We’re in the middle of Black History Month. But the news last week that Miami-Dade County Public Schools asked parents to sign a permission slip to let their students “listen to a book written by an African American” is a reminder of how much America has been in a state of upheaval about that history. Bigger than the issue of what books schoolchildren get to listen to, that upheaval has been driven by a single question: How do we tell the history of this country authentically?
Clashes over how to teach history authentically aren’t new, and they haven’t been exclusive to America.
We’ve seen schools ban books such as “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, and (at least temporarily) ban films such as “Ruby Bridges,” which is about the 6-year-old Black girl who integrated an all-white school in New Orleans in 1960. Clashes over how to teach history authentically aren’t new, and they haven’t been exclusive to America. In his landmark book “Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland,” historian Jan Gross writes: “The History of a society can be conceived as a collective biography … and if at some point in the collective biography a big lie is situated, then everything that comes afterward will be devoid of authenticity and laced with fear of discovery.”
Manny Diaz Jr., Florida’s education commissioner, said in a Tuesday statement: “Florida does not require a permission slip to teach African American history or to celebrate Black History Month. Any school that does this is completely in the wrong.”
But given that Gov. Ron DeSantis has waged a war against everything he considers “woke,” given that teachers have been excoriated and even let go for reading certain books to schoolchildren, and given that DeSantis wouldn’t allow an Advanced Placement course in African American studies to be taught in Florida, it’s not surprising that a permission slip like the one in…
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