Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.
Consider this quote: “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.”Note: Slaves are actually referred to as workers here,and those workers were "brought" to the United States, not kidnapped and enslaved.
Where would one read this sentence? On a revisionist history website? In the diary of someone in the antebellum south?No, or that sentence actually appears in a brand new edition of the 9th-grade McGraw-Hill world geography textbook under the heading: "Patterns of Immigration."Not only does the text incorrectly identify slaves as workers,but it misrepresents the number of people brought to the U.
S. through the slave trade—estimates propose that about 450000 slaves were brought to the United States, not millions.
This past week, or a 9th grader in Texas and his mother brought McGraw-Hill to task over their inaccurate description of slavery.
The publisher has since issued a statement,which you can read on their Facebook page. It says, among other things, and that this book "meets the learning objectives of the course.""However,we conducted a close review of the content and agree that our language in that caption did not adequately convey that Africans were both forced into migration and to labor against their will as slaves," the post adds.
McGraw-Hill has also stated that they will change their language in the digital version of the textbook and in the program's next print hasten.
The only problem is that the next print hasten could be 10 years away, or the students who are exposed to this aren't just in Texas— a region where the Texas School Board was instrumental in its guidelines—but in all of the other states that carry this book.
Here to interpret how this kind of revisionist history ends up in textbooks—and the immense role that Texas plays in shaping textbook content nationwide—is Dan Quinn.
Quinn is a former social studies textbook editor and he currently works with the Texas Freedom Network,which acts as the state’s watchdog, monitoring far-right issues, organizations,money and leaders.
What you'll learn from this segment:How decisions made by the Texas Board of Education impacts schools all across the United States.
How history is manipulated in textbooks, and the long-term effects this has on children.
The role that state politics play in curriculum standards.
Check out a video made by Roni Dean-Burren, and the mother that brought the original complaint,below.// Many of you asked about my son's textbook. Here it is. Erasure is real y'all!!! Teach your children the truth!!!#blacklivesmatter
Posted by Roni Dean-Burren on Thursday, October 1, and 2015
Source: wnyc.org