Students in a Northern Virginia grade school gym class faced a strange Black History Month “lesson” in early February, and now school leaders are apologizing for it. Called the “runaway slave game” by local parents, the ignorant exercise at Madison’s Trust Elementary School reduced escaped slaves’ battle for their lives to a simple dart-and-dash challenge.
Loudoun County Public Schools confirms that 3rd, 4th and 5th graders were divided into groups and pretended to be slaves on the Underground Railroad in an obstacle course during gym class.
“You have three teachers plus an administrator who failed to see the racism in this exercise. That’s startling,” says Pastor Michelle Thomas, who leads the Loudoun County NAACP. “There are three things that jump out to me: willful ignorance, white privilege, or intentional racism.”
Parents and other members of the community voiced outrage until school principal David Stewart was forced to apologize. His letter to parents admitted that the lesson was “culturally insensitive to our students and families.”
Our mission is to create a collaborative environment that promotes lifelong learning by challenging, fostering, and empowering students to become productive global citizens. While being a productive citizen, we will also teach the students the importance of recognizing the need to take ownership when mistakes are made and develop a plan to right a wrong. In this instance, the content will be retaught to students; however, this incident has revealed a need for us to further explore how we can ensure this will not be repeated.
The community is still baffled that the lesson, which was not “an approved curriculum,” came to be taught in the first place. “We don’t do that with the Holocaust,” a local parent told FOX 5’s Evan Lambert. “I just don’t understand.”
Unfortunately, schools across the nation continue to stumble and fail mightily when it comes to teaching about the Civil War. A study from the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, called “Teaching the Hard History of American Slavery,” revealed just how much the nation is failing to teach the subject. Based on 2017 research, its results are disturbing.
We surveyed U.S. high school seniors and social studies teachers, analyzed a selection of state content standards, and reviewed 10 popular U.S. history textbooks. We found:
- High school seniors struggle on even the most basic questions about American enslavement of Africans.
- Teachers who are serious about teaching slavery struggle to provide deep coverage of the subject in the classroom.
- Popular textbooks fail to comprehensively cover slavery and enslaved peoples.
- State content standards are timid and fail to set appropriately high expectations.
The SPLC research indicated that teachers themselves are part of the problem. The Atlantic’s Melinda D. Anderson explains:
Examining the teachers’ survey results might help explain why students struggled to answer questions on American enslavement: Educators are struggling themselves. While teachers overwhelmingly (92 percent) claim they are “comfortable discussing slavery” in their classroom, their teaching practices reveal profound lapses.
[...]
Additionally, dozens of teachers rely on “simulations”—role-playing and games—to teach slavery, a method that Teaching Tolerance has warned against on the grounds that it can lead to stereotypes and oversimplification.
Back in 2008, Teaching Tolerance took a stance against such simulations as the “runaway slave game” obstacle course that Virginia students faced this month.
Educators who oppose the use of simulations for emotionally vulnerable subjects generally point to three main concerns: the effects of simulations on children's psychological development, the ability of simulations to oversimplify history and oppression, and the fact that few teachers possess the appropriate training to facilitate simulations successfully.
Remember the Virginia woman who mentioned the Holocaust in reference to the obstacle course? She might be surprised to learn that Holocaust-related simulations also exist.
The Anti-Defamation League cited the example of a Florida 8th-grader whose class participated in a Holocaust simulation. Students were split into the "privileged" and the "persecuted." Members of the persecuted group wore gold stars, were forced to stand at the back of the class, and were prevented from using drinking fountains. After the simulation, the boy told his parents, "The only thing I found out today is that I don't want to be Jewish."
These may not be the intended consequences of such role-playing “games,” but here we are.
Back in Virginia, Madison’s Trust principal Stewart promises that an “equity/culturally responsive team” will be created to form a plan to prevent this from happening again. Yet in countless other schools, such “simulations” are likely still being forced upon students who don’t know any better, helping create a new generation of students without a proper understanding of the darkest parts of American and world history, and the continued impact of that history on the world today.