Is kindergarten the right time to teach young children about slavery?
Virginia thinks so... and something tells us a lesson about Virginia's Governor wearing blackface in his college yearbook won't be mentioned.
Virginia kindergarten students will learn about institutional racism alongside the alphabet, according to new curriculum recommendations created for the upcoming school year.
Loudoun County is adding "social justice" to the mission of teaching elementary school students reading, writing, and arithmetic. The Washington, D.C., suburb—the richest county in the country—has teamed up with the Southern Poverty Law Center's (SPLC) education arm Teaching Tolerance to develop its new curriculum. The proposed lesson plan recommends restructuring history and social studies classes to emphasize slavery as fundamental to American society for students from kindergarten to the fifth grade.
"Sugarcoating or ignoring slavery until later grades makes students more upset by or even resistant to true stories about American history," the documents say. "Long before we teach algebra, we teach its component parts. We should structure history instruction the same way."