There are a lot of teachers, and each teacher has a lot of chances to make mistakes. This teacher, it seems to me, was trying to get the students to think about how people justified slavery. The teacher didn’t phrase the assignment in the best way-- although it may have been prefaced by a long lesson on what white people thought were “good” reasons for slavery. But I don’t want to pillory teachers with (what I think are) good intentions when they make mistakes carrying out the good intentions.
Fourth graders are nine or ten. I agree with @doschicos that nine- and ten-year-olds are not too young to start thinking about how people justified behavior that most of us now think is evil and abhorrent. When I was a kid, we were presented with historical behavior that we now think is wrong, but not given much of a discussion about why people then believed it was right.
That lead me, and my agemates, to smugly believe that we wouldn’t have believed those abhorrent beliefs or done those abhorrent actions. But, clearly, we probably would have. Most people at the time did, and there’s nothing special about my fourth grade class. Everyone in my fourth grade class was not some moral marvel, able to resist seductive evil; we were just regular kids, who mostly went along with what was going on.
Thanks @“Cardinal Fang”. I’m going to have to put a disclosure statement on all my posts saying that 90% of the time I automatically type apostrophes at the end of any words that end in “s” or “t”. I started doing that a couple of years ago and I don’t know why. And unfortunately I don’t catch it sometimes when proofreading. Sorry if that offended your grammatical sensibilities.
But yes, I do know that “grader’s” is not possessive and should not have had an apostrophe.
Greengrocer’s apostrophes and inappropriate use of scare quotes are pet peeves of mine, but I’m terrible with hyphens, and I don’t know how to type an em-dash. I’m sorry I brought you into my comment about scare quotes, @LeastComplicated.
My point was, and is, that many adults don’t understand scare quotes, so very likely the fourth graders in this class didn’t understand, either. My larger point is, the teacher IMO was trying to do something good, and failed in execution.
MANY people do this now. I admit that it is one of my pet peeves. I wonder if all of this apostrophe love is due to auto correct (when people are posting from their phones).
Back to topic, the whole thing makes more sense if one assumes the teacher was actually trying to get the kids to think about how people of the time justified slavery. The idea was poorly executed, but the explanation does seem plausible.
I don’t think people are giving fourth graders enough credit. My kids were reading Harry Potter in second grade and The Lord of the Rings in third grade. They knew all about good and evil and difficult choices.
It’s shades of gray, hypocricy, and false rationalizations that are more complex. I do think it’s valuable to develop the ability to shift perspectives and move away from black/white, all good vs. all evil thinking – but I also think that the wording of the assignment was inappropriate. After all, Thomas Jefferson was a slave holder, and also was the primary drafter of the Declaration of Independence.
You can’t really study American history without understanding the depth of the issue in economic terms. But the question would be to explore the reasons why the southern states wanted to preserve slavery – and why the original drafters of the US Constitution were willing to compromise on the issue. And I really don’t know how much can be expected at the 4th grade level. But I woudn’t think much of an APUSH class that failed to explore those dynamics in depth.
4th grade may be a little young to learn about the complexity of pro-slavery justifications. However, children should always be presented with the entire history, even if it’s not flattering to the US Government. It’s completely appropriate to have middle school or high school aged kids read some of John Calhoun or John Rutledge to realize how dehumanizing slavery was.
I was just thinking how early kids can be radicalized. Look no further than terrorist groups with young kids thinking being a suicide bomber is their pathway to heaven. Young kids are very susceptible. While some may be too complex for their developing brains it is certainly worthwhile to start hearing the discussions. But we should be careful to not put today’s political correctness on historical times. One thing my kids did in elementary school was learn about the first two ships to come to Maryland. They taped out the size of the boat and stood in it. They learned a lot about indentured servitude. My daughter basically sold herself away for some creature comforts. Too many schools teach history so dry and boring it’s hard for kids to grasp.
Fourth grade in our school focuses on NYS history and immigration. There’s always a class trip to Ellis Island. The year my youngest was in fourth grade they put on a musical, where one of the song’s refrain was “No Irish need apply.”
There were no “good” reasons for slavery in the Bible, @romanigypsyeyes . It existed, as it did in most ancient civilizations, but it was never held up as good. People justified it for their own selfish reasons, but that isn’t the same as calling it good. God, in his mercy, gave the ancient Hebrews rules for how to treat the people they held as slaves, but his goal was for humankind to end the institution. We’re just slow and dense to get this.
In one example in the New Testamant, Paul, in his letter to Philemon-- the master of Onesimus, a runaway enslaved man–urges the man to take him back as a brother. Because Paul doesn’t call out slavery, a lot of people think that he condoned it. But God has never condoned or desired people to be enslaved. The fact that Christians “owned” human beings for centuries is sickening and wrong, but it was never God’s plan.
@ucbalumnus , a better assignment would have been to ask those kids to come up with three reasons humans have used to justify slavery. That would have led to some good critical thinking (“just because I can come up with a reason why it is okay does not make it morally right.”)
The issue of theodicy (the problem of evil) is a difficult one for all believers. A lot of believers resort to saying that the ways of God are mysterious and we can’t comprehend them. Making the bold claim that you know God’s plan and can explain it to the rest of us opens up a big can of worms: What evidence do you have that ending slavery was God’s plan? If He wanted to end slavery, how come He didn’t punish anybody for having slaves, and how come He didn’t say anything about slavery being evil in the Ten Commandments? The dude is all powerful, and He wanted humans to end slavery, but He didn’t bother to mention it? How were people supposed to know?
And while a private church school can teach anything it wants in terms of religious doctrine or values, mixing up religious teachings with history is not a way to develop criical thinking skills-- so not sure it is what the teacher intended with the poorly worded assigment in any case.
@“Cardinal Fang” @calmom I certainly don’t know any more of God’s plans than what is outlined in the Bible, which anyone can read. But it’s clear from that that God wants everyone’s freedom, not their bondage.
And the 10 Commandments at their heart do give a blueprint first for how to treat God, and second for how to treat one another. We are free to obey or not obey, or even to disregard them, of course, but we can’t say that God’s plan for how to act is mysterious and unknowable, or explainable only by trained theologians.
You could certainly tell a 4th grader the reasons people used to justify slavery. What I don’t think is appropriate is to frame it in a way that asks why slavery might be considered a “good” thing. There is a difference between presenting justifications and discussing why you think the justification is right or wrong. That is not the same as framing it in a way that asks a 4th grader to find “good” in a right/wrong scenario. It may seem petty, but I think it’s important to understand the difference. I would bet most 4th graders think slavery is wrong; therefore, it is not good, regardless of why some people thought it was okay. And for the record, I cannot think of any reason any person could ever believe it is okay to own another person. Ever. Period. No discussion. So maybe that colors my thinking.
Why would that be? Why would I need to understand a slavery apologist’s reasoning in order to understand why I oppose it? I’m actually really puzzled by this. I’ll go back to my earlier assertion, that there are not two sides to everything.