Students at a suburban St. Louis school district can continue to take elective Black history courses, school leaders announced Thursday in a reversal of a vote last week by the conservative-led school board to end the classes.
But the Francis Howell School District board first must approve a new curriculum “that is rigorous and largely politically neutral,” the board president and superintendent said in a statement Thursday to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“After thorough discussions, we believe there is an appropriate path forward to offer Black History and Black Literature with an updated curriculum standard in the 2024-2025 school year,” board President Adam Bertrand and Superintendent Kenneth Roumpos said.
The Francis Howell School District board voted 5-2 last week to stop offering Black History and Black Literature courses that had been offered at the district’s three high schools since 2021. A little over 100 students took the courses this semester in the predominantly white suburban area of St. Louis.
“We want the classes to be politically neutral. As such, we’ve removed any references to slavery, as it may offend conservative students to learn that conservatives have always been vile pieces of shit.”
You would think it would be cheaper to teach the truth than to afford all that extra white paint for all the history books.
It’s do sad that “conservatives hiding any facts that effect the believability of their racist narrative” is what they actually mean by “politically neutral.”
No, but you see, democrats were the bigger racists then.
And the parties totally never swapped political orientations. Now stop asking why I would want to preserve this “democrat” statue of a racist rebel.
There is no ‘politically neutral’ way to teach black history. And they know this.
Coming soon: Missouri black history curriculum says blacks learned useful skills from slavery.
a new curriculum “that is rigorous and largely politically neutral
Those are mutually exclusive. When one side of the political divide wants to rewrite history to make it seem like white people in the past were blameless, no rigorous curriculum can be anywhere near politically neutral.
To some people, any talk of race comes across as playing the “race card”. The chance that they were taught next to nothing about the experience and history of other races/classes in this country is very high.
Thankfully, some of us struck out on our own to research the experiences and history of people of color in the U.S. But not enough do and not enough is taught by any means.
