Classroom Experiences

In the late nineteen eighties, New York's Board of Regents did something very few people expected.

Together with the Commissioner of Education, they created a task force to determine if the state's social studies curriculum adequately reflected the pluralistic nature of American society.

The task force was a veritable who's who of scholars of color, and with great care, they examined the curricular materials used in New York's public schools, and what they found was disturbing.

In a report entitled A Curriculum for Inclusion, they concluded that African Americans and Asian Americans and Latinos and Native Americans were, as a whole, negatively characterized in the existing curriculum.

They also discovered that the contributions made by these groups to US society and culture were almost completely omitted.

As a remedy, they suggested revamping the entire curriculum so that it reflected the multicultural experiences and contributions of every American.

I was in high school when the task force released its report, just chilling at Brooklyn's finest public school, Midwood High School at Brooklyn College.

Midwood is in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a working-class neighborhood that produced the Foosnickins, Special Ed, and the notorious RBG.

Biggie's from around Bed-Stuy.

So I can attest to the truth and accuracy of the Curriculum for Inclusion report.

The Black experience was almost entirely absent from my classes.

Subjects like slavery were reduced to the unfortunate personal practices of a handful of men way down south somewhere.

And when slavery was over, well, it was just over.

The Curriculum for Inclusion report came some twenty years after the height of organizing efforts by Black Brooklynites to gain greater curricular control over the schools in their neighborhoods.

In this sense, a curriculum for inclusion was long overdue, but it was still the Reagan era, so the report was also very much ahead of its time.

When the report was made public, political conservatives lost their collective minds.

They accused the task force of contemptuously dismissing the Western tradition and of contributing to the reduction of history to ethnic cheerleading.

Bowing to political pressure, New York's Commissioner of Education shelved A Curriculum for Inclusion.

A few years later, another task force reached similar conclusions.

But once again, the findings report infuriated the Western tradition crowd, so its recommendations were also largely ignored.

I am often asked, what was it about my early education that sparked my interest in history? Inherent in this question is an assumption that there were subjects covered in my elementary and high school classes that whetted my appetite for more.

And in a sense, there were.

But my historical curiosity did not stem from what I was learning in the classroom.

It was instead a result of what I was not learning in the classroom.

I was not learning about slavery and its legacy in a way that made the slightest bit of sense to me, given the stark racial inequality that I saw every day as I rode the subway to and from school.