The discussion regarding the skills some enslaved people received is raging due to a Florida text book singing the praises of plantations at trade schools. I put my two cents in here.

What is interesting is that the a lot of conservative feedback is focusing on the truth of what is in the text book and not the relevance. The line causing the controversy is about the skills that a slave might acquire while working on a plantation which is really a weak way of trying to find something good about having been a slave.

I will let the historians debate the veracity of the statement because I think there is a bigger problem than the truth here. Who cares if it is true? How relevant is it to understanding the Civil War and Reconstruction. The vast majority of the slaves didn’t receive that training so when the Civil War ended the only skill they had was field work. That a few lucky individuals were blacksmiths while slaves and were able to take that skill and make a good life for themselves is a great story but not particularly illuminating on what happened to the millions who did not.

It is a trick. It allows Governor DeSantis to soften the horrible image that white children might conjure when they learn about their slave-holding ancestors. Because White children, for some reason, shouldn’t have to learn about how wretched the slaves were actually treated. Why they may begin to hate their ancestors? And I say good. It is about time.

This also exposes a much bigger problem with American History. There is a tendency to highlight the successes of a few individuals and say this is what is possible. This is actually what could happen to you. The other side of the story is downplayed. The millions of people who don’t make it out of poverty or don’t make a million dollars. Stories just as true as the success stories but, for some reason, we don’t want to tell. Numbers and statistics aren’t personal stories of success. They are abstract so the child can’t see themselves in this personal story even though it is every bit as likely, if not more likely, as making a million dollars.

All these complaints from employers who have to deal with young people with high expectations of their employment might be better addressed if we gave children a more realistic history of what might happen to them. They might understand that world a bit better and not be so disappointed when it doesn’t happen to them. Maybe we should teach them that hard work is often unrewarded. And talented people sometime go unrecognized. The good guys don’t always win. Sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes people, even leaders of our country, do horrible things. We want kids to have this glorified image of what America is when it is a lot more complicated than that.

There is this fear if children learn the truth that they will just give up on their country. The thing is they do eventually learn the truth but in the process they will also learn that people they trusted, the teachers and the parents played fast and loose with the truth. How is that better?