Heather C. McGhee and Victor Ray’s New York Times op-ed on the purpose of the public schools begins with a point with which I agree:
Why do we have public schools? To make young people into educated, productive adults, of course. But public schools are also for making Americans. Thus, public education requires lessons about history — the American spirit and its civics — and also contact with and context about other Americans: who we are and what has made us.
The original purpose of the public schools, as anyone who has read John Dewey who laid their foundation can tell you, was to acculturate the children of immigrants and inculcate American values in them, making them into good American citizens.
I was fortunate that the American history I learned in grade school and high school had considerable continuity with the American history my parents had learned in grade school but, since I was reared in a skeptical household, I also learned that the bowdlerized, mythologized history we were taught was not the entire story. The mythology included Parson Weems—that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and never told a lie and that Abe Lincoln was a rail-splitter and that America was the last best hope of earth. I also knew about racism and the race riots of the 1920s (including the Tulsa riots) and I knew that the Founders and, indeed, no politicians were perfect. My parents taught me that racism was a terrible sin.
The question is not whether public school students will be taught a mythical history. They will be. As Korzybski put it, the map is not the territory. The questions are which mythology will they be taught and who decides?
I agree with the authors that there are aspects of American history to which students should be exposed at age-appropriate points including slavery, racism, bigotry, Jim Crow, and ongoing racism. However, I do not think that students or the country will be well-served by teaching them the mythology of the 1619 Project which includes that slavery is one of the founding principles of the United States, that slavery and racism are basic to American society, or that the United States is distinctive in its racism.
I think they’d be better off learning Parson Weems.
” that slavery is one of the founding principles of the United States,”
Its not? What’s with that 3/5 thing? Look at how prevalent it was when the US was formed. Maybe you can quibble about the word principle but it was well entrenched and viewed as necessary by half the country.
Slavery was seen as a defect rather than a founding principle. The 3/5s matter has been answered many times. It was an anti-slavery measure rather than a pro-slavery measure. It was a compromise. Yes, compromise is one of our founding principles. As Plato taught compromise is necessary for a republic.
There is no measure by which the Confederacy was half of the country—not population, not economy, not acreage of farms, not even the number of states.
It’s amazing to me that the constitution, worded as it is, was ever ratified at all.
Trampling all over the interests of the most powerful men in the land, the landowners, to secure cheap, powerless labor for production of tobacco, sugar, timber, and cotton.
They could not have cared less about the color of their workers, and they used all colors, but would loose Hell at any sign of revolt.
It has been suggested that the owners taught or encouraged racism to create a wedge between the enslaved and the bonded, who otherwise would be natural allies.
Profit was America’s purpose, and European corporations were it’s pioneers.
As for racism being a sin, I assume you mean institutional, not simply distrust of the other, which I would consider setting the bar too high.
So we ratified a defective constitution? Why? So we could allow slavery to continue. Yup, this has been talked about many times and it is all about trying to justify the compromise. Absent the need for slavery by the slave states it would not have been an issue.
“There is no measure by which the Confederacy was half of the country”
Every state gets 2 senators. Up until about 1850 slave states and are states were equally divided. (Cant get rest of chart to copy which goes up until 1850.) So in the most meaningful way that a country can be divided, by the way it chooses to govern itself, the slaves states had half at our founding and it persisted for almost 100 years.
Slave states Year Free states Year
Delaware 1787 New Jersey
(Slave until 1804) 1787
Georgia 1788 Pennsylvania 1787
Maryland 1788 Connecticut 1788
South Carolina 1788 Massachusetts 1788
Virginia 1788 New Hampshire 1788
North Carolina 1789 New York (Slave until 1799) 1788
Kentucky 1792 Rhode Island 1790
Tennessee 1796 Vermont 1791
Louisiana 1812 Ohio 1803
Steve
In 1860 there were 33 states. The Confederacy had 11 states. Not half by any reckoning.
The North had 2/3s of the population of the United States, 2/3s of the GDP, and 2/3s of the farmland. It also had a lot more miles of roads and railroads (more than 2/3s).
In 1790 the South was more populous than the North. Including slaves in the enumeration the same as freemen would have ensured the persistence of slavery. The South would have completely dominated. Not enumerating them at all was not acceptable to the Southern states.
The alternative was no United States. Had that been the case we would have been swallowed up by Britain, France, and Spain. That was said explicitly at the time, cf. Federalist 11 (just one example). It also delayed war between the States.
Slave states by 1850. 1-Georgia 2_Delaware 3- Maryland 4-South Carolina 5-Virginia 6-N Carolina 7-Kentucky 8-Tennessee 9-Louisiana 10- Mississippi 11-Alabama 12-MIssouri 13-Arkanasas 14- Florida 15- Texas
Remember that Delaware had about 2000 slaves when the war broke out and attempts to end slavery before the war had failed. There were 87,000 slaves in MD in 1860. And so on for the other border states that joined the union. So the Confederacy had only 11 states but my claim was that slavery was entrenched in half of the states and we are really talking about the founding years, not 100 years later. I have just documented that. Then we admitted 4 are states in a row starting with Kansas in 1850 and broke the balance.
Steve
I don’t think slavery was a founding principle just based on the definition of “principle.” It was a founding feature of parts of the country, but the idea that it was a universal principle for the country as a whole seems a bit ridiculous to me. I mean, we ended up fighting a very bloody civil war over the question of slavery which is a pretty major clue that slavery wasn’t a founding principle.
There was a lot of bad shit going on in the 18th century that doesn’t meet our moral standards today – are we supposed to state categorically that all of those are also “founding principles” of the United States because they were in existence at the founding? For example, is misogyny a “founding principle” of the United States considering women were disenfranchised in all states, not just a handful? Do we say that genocide is a “founding principle” of the country due to the butchery that occurred both before and after the founding?
Cannot understand the motivation of people who are financially and socially comfortable who dredge up the actions of past generations to make a point with no purpose.
Comfortable, they obviously don’t want the social system dissolved, so my best guess is that they are seeking approbation from their peer group, which is apparently an insatiable itch.
Andy- We fought a war almost 100 years later and what we are talking about are attitudes at our founding. We couldn’t even start having a country if we were not willing to compromise on slavery. Absent acceptance of slavery, the US does not exist. You can quibble over whether that makes it a principle but it was certainly a very widely practiced and accepted behavior with the majority of the population, even many of those who opposed slavery, believing that black people were inherently inferior. Look at Delaware. Only 2000 slaves and they still couldn’t get rid of slavery.
Good point Andy. Were people willing to die to maintain misogyny? Remember that the Civil War was fought on one side to eliminate slavery but the other side was willing to die to maintain it. For those people, who as I have shown made up a significant percentage of Americans, slavery was a basic belief/need/principle, whatever you want to call it that they were willing to die to try to maintain it.
So lets compromise. We wont say slavery was a founding principle but we will say that we could not form the US without the presence of slavery and that a very large percentage of Americans believed slavery was so important they were willing to kill and to die to maintain it. That even many of the states we now think of as free states because they didnt join the confederacy were actually slave states.
” who dredge up the actions of past generations”
I guess the natural retort is to wonder why some people want to ignore, gloss over or lie about our history, but I dont really wonder about that.
Steve
What the heck. The linked site give the populations for the colonies in 1770. Add them up remembering the New York was slave state until 1799 and (rounding off) 1,190,000 people lived in slave states and 895,000 in free states.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/states/thirteen-colonies
Steve
steve,
One can condemn America’s history of slavery and racism (or misogyny) without believing it was a founding principle that makes it an inseparable and essential aspect of the country itself. Because if slavery or misogyny were founding principles of this country, then that means that liberty and equality cannot also be a founding principle since, as principles, they would be mutually exclusive.
I think the other explanation and narrative is much better and more consistent with how our country has actually evolved – that we have founding principles, such as liberty and equality under the law, that we have never been able to fully live up to. In this view, slavery was antithetical to our founding principles and it was an aberration that we excised via war. The advancement of women’s political rights did not take a war, but was nevertheless the country moving closer to the country’s actual ideals and founding principles.