On a worksheet that echoes both Fox News’s “fair and balanced” slogans and Donald Trump’s “blame on both sides” comments about Charlottesville, San Antonio middle schoolers were tasked with an impossible exercise: imagine the upside to being a slave.
The homework assignment, titled “The Life of a Slave: A Balanced View,” asked students to list the positive and negative aspects of being owned by another human being and forced into hard labor. One student tells CNN that he called bullshit on the assignment immediately—literally.
"When I first read it, I thought, this was b.s.," said Great Hearts Monte Vista eighth-grade student Manu Livar.
Manu said his teacher told them to draw on information from their textbook and "stuff that we could think of off the top of our head."
It was a precursor to the class reading former slaves' accounts of their lives in slavery.
When his mother picked Manu up, he showed her the assignment; she immediately sent a picture of it to her husband.
Manu’s father, Roberto Livar, quickly contacted the school and posted Manu’s (brilliantly) completed worksheet on his Facebook page on Wednesday.
The charter school responded quickly, insisting that the assignment was limited to one instructor. That teacher, identified by Facebook commenters only as “Mr. Thomas,” has been put on paid leave pending an investigation. The school’s Facebook post led to a heartbreaking debate from other Great Hearts parents who defended both the assignment and the teacher, even alluding to some personal struggles that might have led to Mr. Thomas being “hasty.”
However, the oh-so-forgiving idea that Mr. T is just going through some stuff right now and didn’t quite know what he was doing was quickly debunked by commenters claiming to be former students who received the same worksheet in years past.
Apparently, decrying slavery as an abomination is considered “indoctrination” by an alarming amount of Great Hearts parents who don’t see the inherent dangers of teaching children that slavery is anything but a disgusting part of American history.
The Great Hearts statement also states that the Prentice Hall history textbook has been pulled from all Great Hearts schools pending an evaluation of its content.
Seems a little late in the school year to be making sure the textbooks aren’t endorsing atrocities like slavery (or the Holocaust, or Japanese internments, for that matter). Pearson, the publisher of the book, claims that no such worksheets were provided by their company.
"The worksheet in question was not created by, endorsed, or encouraged in any way by Pearson," Director of Media Relations Scott Overland told mySA.com in an email. "We do not support this point of view and strongly condemn the implication that there was any positive aspect to slavery."
But here’s the thing—the Prentice Hall textbook actually does imply that slavery wasn’t all that bad. Just a couple days before Manu brought home his heinous assignment, another Texas mom noticed a problem with her daughter’s own copy of Prentice Hall Classics: A History of the United States, and took to Twitter.
Here’s a transcription of the image, just in case it doesn’t load for every reader:
"But the ‘peculiar institution,’ as Southerners came to call it, like all human institutions should not be oversimplified. While there were cruel masters who maimed or even killed their slaves (although killing and maiming were against the law in every state), there were also kind and generous owners. The institution was as complex as the people involved. Though most slaves were whipped at some point in their lives, a few never felt the lash. Nor did all slaves work in the fields. Some were house servants or skilled artisans. Many may not have even been terribly unhappy with their lot, for they knew no other. But certainly others were, as the Nat Turner revolt revealed."
The textbook in question is a “revised” version of a 1981 tome, and, according to Curtright, was released in 2007. There are great dangers and far-reaching consequences to whitewashing slavery. A 2017 Teaching Tolerance study not only found glaring gaps in student knowledge, but also in the educators tasked with teaching the subject.
… the study exposes a number of unsettling facts about slavery education in U.S. classrooms: Slavery is taught without context, prioritizing “feel good” stories over harsh realities; slavery is taught as an exclusively southern institution, masking the complicity of northern institutions and citizens in America’s slave-based economy; slavery is rarely connected to white supremacy—the ideology that justified its perpetuation; and slavery is seldom connected to the present, drawing the arc from enslavement to Jim Crow, the civil-rights movement, and the persistence of structural racism.
Unfortunately, and unknown to many parents in America, a small cadre of conservative Texans have long had (and flexed) the power to shape the content of textbooks that are in turn used around the nation. Want to know more about that tangled web? Check out this deep dive into the corruption of it all, from the New York Review of Books.
