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Texas Narrowly Rejects Allowing Academics To Fact-Check Public School Textbooks (csmonitor.com)
jriding writes with news that in a 8-7 vote the Texas State Board of Education rejected a plan to create a group of state university professors to fact-check textbooks approved for the state's 5.2 million public-school students. The CS Monitor reports: "The Board of Education approves textbooks in the nation's second-largest state and stood by its vetting process — despite a Houston-area mother recently complaining that a world geography book used by her son's ninth grade class referred to African slaves as 'workers.' The publisher, McGraw-Hill Education, apologized and moved to make immediate edits."
The actual wording of the textbook reads:
While that alone may technically be accurate, it's a great mischaracterization of the situation. It's even more egregious because the section of the book it's in is under "Patterns of Immigration". It's not really immigration when it's a forced migration to a place you're not even recognized as a full human let alone any chance, at that time, of being a citizen.
"Well, what I told you was true, from a certain point of view." - Obi-wan Kenobi
They're all partly true, and partly incorrect, as each only tells part of a larger story.
-The USA cited British impressment of sailors, interference in trade, and other such provocations by Britain, as part of its declaration of war. To a degree, this is true from the American viewpoint at the time (the British didn't see it that way of course), as many Americans felt that way.
-One of the other goals stated by pro-war American politicians at the time was the annexation of Canada (they thought the Canadians would, to borrow a more recent phrase, "greet them as liberators"). During the course of the war, the USA tried to invade Canada on several occasions, only to meet with failure. Thus, it's certainly reasonable for Canadians to have seen things that way.
-The war took place during the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, in which Britain was the leader of the anti-Napoleon coalition (having been the only one to remain at war the entire time). Several of the major reasons cited for the war arose from British actions against France, such as blocking trade, impressment of sailors, and so forth, so it's certainly fair to view the war as part of the Napoleonic Wars. That said, the USA did not ally with France, nor was its conclusion tied to that of the war against Napoleon, and the USA and France did not assist or cooperate with each other in any military ventures during the conflict.
The sentence in question:
“The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations."
The issues is with the use of the word 'workers' instead of 'slaves'.
The sentence is factually correct either way.
Both versions cover the necessary facts of the time concerning how slavery (evil) provided cheap labor which made the economics of agricultural plantations (good) possible.
This is not so much an issue of fact, but rather one of emphasis or spin.
Did the original version under emphasize the evils of slavery?
The answer probably mostly depends not on the debate, but rather on you attitude coming into the debate.
If you start from the premiss that slavery was bad and absolutely no good came from it, then I can see that one can't ever under emphasize the evils of slavery.
It may not be PC to say it, but that premiss seems incorrect.
Slavery permitted the development of the Americas which seems good.
The slaves paid dearly, but their ancestors ended up with a better life which seems good.
This particular use of slavery seems to have gotten humanity to the general consensus that slavery is evil which seems very good.
I think if you can find some pointy headed liberals that are willing to weigh the good and bad in things, then fact checking might be good.
If all you can find are PC police, then perhaps not.
I know at least 3 children (including my next door neighbor's child) who left public schools for affordable private alternatives and returned 3 or 4 years later. These children ended up way behind the students who stayed in public schools.
The reality is that there are a few really good private schools that most middle-class families can't afford (unless your child is exceptional, can demonstrate it on paper, and would be considered an asset to the school to offset the rich-but-dumb kids), and a whole lot of "schools" that will take your money but offer very little. They won't even kick out losers, which is really the best reason private schools exist.
Texas public schools are terrible, but the text books aren't even the worst part. Saddest, Texas public schools aren't even close to the worst they're pretty good by red state standards.
It's immigration (and emigration) whenever a group of people migrate from one region to another, regardless of what the reason is or how they're treated.
It's a little bit of a tricky word territory because it would be inaccurate to call them "immigrants". That word is usually used in modern English to refer to non-forced migration, so could make the reader draw inaccurate conclusions.
It is, though, completely reasonable to put the event under a discussion of "Patterns of Immigration", because that is clearly referring to large-scale movements of people with important sociological and historical impacts. Historically, many major human migrations have been the result of slavery, exile, genocide, and other such unpleasant and rather non-voluntary reasons. They're still called migrations.
This is just one more indication of the sorry state of education in our country. Why should we present accurate, fair, and objective material to our students? It seems to me that this is an effort to protect the teaching of creationism, something that has no scientific grounding and is pure religious mythology.
Slave labor wasn't as bad as people believe... if you lived long enough to be slave labor. Getting abducted from your home, dragged packed like sardines in the ship, more than half your comrades dying of disease and malnutrition, poked, prodded, sold, screamed at... if you made it, what you got was a shitty life akin to poverty in prison. People imagine slave masters constantly beating slaves while smiling wickedly with demon fangs poking out of their mouths; in reality, the actual labor wasn't too bad, just everything else about life sucked--particularly the part about being property, confined to a barn like some sort of mule, and occasionally raped.
The thing about slavery in the US is that people hear it and think of massive plantations utilizing scores of slave labor in horrible conditions, when the reality was much different. Slaves were an expensive investment akin to machinery today. The majority of slaveholders only owned at most a handful of slaves (if that much) and treated them fairly decently. Beating a slave regularly has as much logic as a modern farmer taking a sledgehammer to his tractor because it broke down. Now, was it a horrible system that deprived people of their free will and humanity? Absolutely. Did things like arbitrary beatings and rapes occur? No doubt. But they weren't widespread, and a lot of poor white farmers lived in conditions not too dissimilar than slaves did. About the only differences between poor whites and the slaves was that the whites were still allowed to own property and participate in politics.
I'm sure someone will miscontrue what I said and claim that I said slavery wasn't bad, which it was. But I will admit that I am one of those people that believes the Civil War wasn't really about slavery, but that slavery was simply a symptom of larger underlying factors that caused the war. So that probably makes me a racist in some people's eyes.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
There are indeed two massive errors in that sentence. First, the total number of slaves brought to the entire US from Africa was about 388000, and less than half a million if you count other points of origin, like the Carribean, not "millions". Second, most of those slaves weren't brought to the "southern United States" because they didn't exist yet, they were brought to British colonies that happen to be where the southern United States is located today.
It was European colonialism that forced more than 10 million Africans into slavery, and only a few percent of those slaves ended up in the territory of the US, most of them before the US even existed.