One Northeast Florida government school teacher is disturbed about how the people of Florida wants history taught but he seems confused about his reasons.
First Coast News reporters managed to ferret out a teacher whose views probably coincide with the station’s own views, and highlighted his notions.
The teacher said he was disturbed when he attended a three-day civics learning session held by the Florida Department of Education that is part of the state’s civics literacy excellence initiative.
He said he was “appalled.”
What appalled him?
“They said only four percent of the slave trade was headed towards the English colonies. Now they shared that map a couple times, and what that map was intended to say is ‘look, everyone was doing it,’ and was a clear attempt to downplay the American institution of slavery and the impact it has.”
But the teacher also told the reporters he had no problem with the facts in the presentation he was paid $700 to attend.
Other people see the nation’s history differently, he said, and those perspectives should be included. The TV reporter also noted that some teachers in liberal South Florida also were upset.
Eye on Jacksonville suspects that millions of people in other parts of Florida are happy.
The local teacher revealed his own confusion when he said – if he was quoted correctly — “This will lead to people substituting students in this case substituting a perspective with reality.” (Did Kamala Harris write it?)
That statement doesn’t even make sense.
In any case, children are supposed to be taught facts, not perspectives. They will be bombarded with those in college.
The perspectives liberals currently are trying to instill in government school students is that America was founded on slavery and remains a racist nation.
That is total nonsense.
The facts are that slavery has existed throughout the world for 4,000 years, yet in the United States the new nation restricted the slave trade within a few years and abolished the horrid practice within the span of one person’s lifetime, at the cost of a bloody war.
That is quick work, for government – especially a brand new one. It isn’t “downplaying” anything to teach children facts. What is abhorrent is to teach them that some of them are victims of imaginary systemic racism, when actually they have the same opportunity as every other child in America.
“Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century,” the noted economist Thomas Sowell once wrote. “People of every race and color were enslaved – and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed.”
Sowell also observed that “the September 2003 issue of National Geographic had an article about the millions of people still enslaved around the world right now. But where is the moral indignation about that?”
One of the few places the practice was questioned and condemned was in the nascent nation created by the Founding Fathers.
Not all people are confused by the liberal attempts to rewrite history.
“The Florida Department of Education will ensure that instruction remains focused on facts, especially in the context of American history, to provide an accurate depiction of our nation’s founding. Partisan indoctrination in the classroom is over,” Education Commissioner Manny Diaz said.
