How was THIS part of the curriculum in the first place?"Over 100 sixth graders at Grover Cleveland Middle School in Caldwell spent several days last week taking part in an assignment where they used terms like 'build a plantation' while completing their 'Lap of Luxury' social studies project...The project instructed students to create an advertisement defending the use of slave labor to run a newly built plantation in South Carolina. Students are told to come up with a 'catchy' name for the plantation and give three reasons why slave labor is the 'best idea' and to add illustrations." (Source: CBS)
This just seems like a poorly thought-through assignment by those who came up with the idea. I don't think embedding the concept of slave labor is acceptable even under the 'guise of being an educational tool. What about you? There are lots of other ways to teach about starting a plantation/business and turning a profit off of laborers/slaves. This should have been stopped before it even became a part of the curriculum.
In a school with only 8 black students...Hmmmnnnn
3 comments:
all i can say is woooow....maybe we'll talk about this in Kiamsha this year
This doesn't surprise me. If you're not comfortable with the dialogue then you have to find "creative" ways to drive the point home. I can only assume this was the "catchy" part of the project and it was followed by a classroom discussion. I hope those students are taken aback by the exercise. If not, it is also a very convincing exercise in American capitalism.
Ah, history, why do you haunt us so?
lawrenorder you always make very poient comments and i truly hope that's what it is...we talked about the "institution" of racism last night in Kiamsha...i am sure we shall come back to that topic many times over...
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