Another Talk to Teachers
" It is not really a “Negro revolution” that is upsetting the country. What is upsetting the country is a sense of its own identity. If, for example, one managed to change the curriculum in all the schools so that Negroes learned more about themselves and their real contributions to this culture, you would be liberating not only Negroes, you’d be liberating white people who know nothing about their own history." James Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers This passage reminds me how the school curriculum has never been meant to liberate or encourage questions. It has always been intended to encourage the norms and structures of society, which means that half-truths and conjecture are often written in textbooks, and repeated in lesson plans. Just recently, a teacher at Lincoln High School in Philadelphia gave his students an assignment asking them to pretend that they were slaves, write a letter to the slavemaster asking for their family to not be ...