The Future is Another Country
As we write catalog entries to gather these artifacts into an exhibit and then interpret the connections that will emerge in exhibition guide essays, we hope to raise questions for the audience, to allow those who are disabled to see themselves in the story.
I always share that I am a student who struggled. My kindergarten teacher told my parents that I would never pass the first grade.
My grandmother was right; my high school students needed me. What my grandmother may not have anticipated though was the extent to which I needed my students.
When this goes down in history, we don’t want the story to be that teachers went on a nine-day strike. We want the story to be that this was the beginning of a snowball effect of wonderful things happening for West Virginia. I think that in order for that to happen, we have to “Remember in November.”
White children who were taught history lessons including information about racism experienced by African Americans demonstrated less biased attitudes toward African Americans than their white counterparts who received otherwise identical lessons that omitted those ‘pessimistic, unpatriotic’ teachings.
Education is political. Most educators stray away from that idea, but it is. In the curriculum and in the choices we make about what to teach and how to teach it, education is political. And, for the most part, our country’s curriculum is white.
Ignorance can be counteracted within schools and the education system by teaching the truth of Britain and Empire. The people of tomorrow aren’t just white British, but are multicultural.
