Title: By teaching slavery adequately, we can overcome our history
Headings: Slavery still shapes all of our lives, yet students aren’t taught its history
Slavery still shapes all of our lives, yet students aren’t taught its history
Glossing over America’s original sin means we can never overcome it
Andre Perry

Content: Not teaching slavery adequately has resulted in a massive hole in school curricula — and that didn’t happen by accident. Legislators, history activists and those who want to project a positive view of the U.S. proactively work to keep the subject from the books, principally by manipulating state education standards and authorizing sanitized texts. Some people feel that slavery, when it existed here, was merely a fact of life that should now be seen as water under the bridge, as Coshocton, Ohio, resident Robert Brems wrote in March for the Coshocton Tribune. Why teach history, he argued, to students who are likely uninterested in the whole enterprise? “ We should be proud of the fact that we fought a Civil War that devastated half of the country and took hundreds of thousands of lives to halt slavery here,” he continued, saying that we should now focus on the good that has been done rather than the evil. “ It has been 150 years since the Civil War, so let us put this part of our history in the rear-view mirror and look forward rather than back and learn from it.” Only 8 percent of surveyed high school seniors could identify slavery as a central cause of the Civil War. While American textbooks deliver a slavery-lite version of history, other countries have chosen to confront the ugliness of their past, not a sanitized version of it. For instance, schools in Germany are legally mandated to teach the Holocaust. In the apartheid museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, patrons are randomly sorted into the white or non-white entrance lines.