That rep doesn't sound very OK to me.
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2025
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Cripes, idiots in OK are officially using white supremacist propaganda in schools...
My understanding is that they basically always were. The South has historically refused to purchase learning material that is "too harsh" on them regarding the Civil War, and so the companies making said material, in order to make the most money, have modified the material to suit that customer base for a long time.
Suicide under chattle slavery is a bleak topic. Better not to bother kids with it.
And having your eyes gouged out is better than being drawn and quartered.
The topic of judging historical figures by modern standards is an important one and actually something that I support discussing in school. (But, for the record, not in the way this article describes.) Im not saying "teaching" because I think there's no one right answer, but the fact that prevailing moral standards were different in the past should be considered. (As should the implication that some of the things we do now will be considered wrong in the future.) If I were teaching it, my intent would be to present celebrating the accomplishments of historical figures without dismissing the bad things they did as one reasonable option, and learning the facts about history but choosing to celebrate only those people who acted entirely according to the students' modern moral standards as another.
I would also like to include the idea of intellectual humility while making decisions under uncertainty. Often you have to make a decision even thought you know you might be making a mistake, so how should the fact that you might be wrong affect what you decide? What might historical figures have done differently if they weren't sure that they were right? The intent is to have children realize that it can be a bad idea to do something if the consequences of being wrong are awful, even if you think you're probably not wrong. But maybe that's too much moralizing for public school...
This is a reasonable approach, and probably the goal of most rational historians. All the famous people throughout history were all fallible humans. None of them were perfect. Someone recently asked me if Ben Franklin was “kind of a dick.” I told them he was a pretty successful guy in his time, so you probably wouldn’t have had to look very far to find someone pointing out how and why he was a dick. Didn’t diminish the other positive things he did. Just a reminder that he was human.
I saw an argument about this kind of thing recently that I think I've come to largely agree with, and it's something like this: why does it actually matter if a historical figure was a "good person" or not? With a living person, there's some utility to knowing this, we generally expect a "bad" person to do objectionable things, making such a person someone not to be trusted with power, or avoided, ect. But a dead person isn't going to be doing anything. There's no cause to consider if a dead guy would make an acceptable leader, or acquittance, or similar, since those things aren't in the cards, so there's not much reason to even care what their moral standards were and how well they actually held to them. What you can get out of those people, is simply what the consequences of their actions were. Judging those consequences by our standards makes some sense, because we can take actions that ultimately seemed to have positive consequences to us as an example and those that we don't like the results of as a warning.
Might people of the future have some different standards that we don't fit? Sure, but those are their ideas of right and wrong, not ours. From our point of view, those hypothetical future people are just as "wrong" as people in the past were. From their point of view, what happens when someone does whatever we do will be more useful information than if we're all a bit evil or something.
I think that there's more to learn from history than just actions and consequences. There is "Who should I be?" rather than just "What should I do in this situation?" You can see what sorts of people tended to do good, and part of that is recognizing what they thought was bad and what was simply in accordance with the morality of the time; disappointing, perhaps, from our modern point of view but not the sign of a flaw greater than the one we have ourselves when we fail to morally innovate.
I also think that there is advancement in morality, not just arbitrarily changes like in fashion. Maybe some things were better in the past (many other people seem to think so) but overall life for almost everyone is better now than it has ever been and that's because of progress not just in technology but in the rules that we have for relating to each other. I expect that I could probably be convinced that the people of the future were right and I was wrong if I knew what the future was, because I think that the future will probably be better than the present.
That's why I place so much emphasis on moral humility. I expect that somewhere, I'm making a mistake. I might agree with some modern-day zealots in principle, but because I'm not sure that I'm right, I don't agree with their methods. That, I think, is the most important lesson of history.