Nobody wants their kids to be indoctrinated. Nobody wants the classroom to become part of the culture wars. Nobody wants the curriculum to become politicized.
It’s reasonable that we’d have concerns about what our kids are being taught. It’s good that we’d be wary of agendas being slipped into their history lessons and their lectures.
But you know what the problem is with the backlash and resistance that has besieged school board meetings and dominated social media? It’s that history has always been political and the stuff that kids were being taught already is propaganda.
There’s this jaw-dropping scene in Wright Thompson’s The Barn (we have copies at the Painted Porch), his deeply moving book about the murder of Emmett Till (which he also discussed on the Daily Stoic podcast). Thompson, in the course of his research, goes back to look at his childhood textbook to see what he’d been taught about Till just thirty years ago. He was shocked by what he saw…or rather didn’t see. In a few sentences, the book wrongly claimed that Till had made a pass at a white woman (and thus deserved what he got) and then went on to focus the negative media attention the case brought to the area.
“One hundred and seventeen words,” he writes, “about the murder of a child that sparked the Civil Rights movement. Or, if you are a white student in a Mississippi Delta school, a case most noteworthy for how it made white people in the Delta look to the rest of the world.”
History is already political! You were sucked into the culture wars already. You were slipped an agenda and no shortage of lies. The uncomfortable changes that people are proposing to the curriculum are an attempt to correct those lies. They are not trying to harm your children—they are trying to help them rise above the harm that was done not just to marginalized groups but to our generation as well, when we were deprived of the truth we deserved to know.
Because the real danger isn’t that our kids will be taught a political version of history—it’s that they’ll be taught a false one. If we want them to think critically, to rise above the mistakes of the past, we have to stop shielding them from it. We have to show them the truth isn’t a threat but a responsibility.
P.S. We highly recommend Wright’s book The Barn and have copies available for purchase at the Painted Porch. You should also check out our full interview with Wright—watch here, or listen over at Spotify and Apple—who discussed the complexity of American history, why it’s important to know where you come from, and the responsibility he felt preserving Emmett’s story for future generations.
