How slavery should be taught in our schools

American Thinker ^ | 03/21/2022 | Randy Boudreaux

[SeekAndFind]

The current backlash against Critical Race Theory in K–12 schools has been mischaracterized as an attempt to ban teaching about slavery.  Actually, the proper teaching of the history of slavery undermines CRT.  Few other topics, when deeply understood, reveal the moral and economic evolution of Western civilization more than does the topic of slavery and the West's crushing of it.

Students need to know that slavery has been nearly universal.  Slavery can be found throughout the world and in every era, including in Africa, well before the Europeans ever attached themselves to this already well established system practiced on members of rival tribes.  Slavery also flourished in the Americas long before Columbus arrived.

Many American students are taught about the trans-Atlantic African slave trade.  However, most have never learned that there was an extensive slave trade that went east to the Arabian Peninsula and north to the Ottoman Empire.  The barbarism of slavery practiced in Arabia and the Ottoman frequently accompanied the brutality of castration of male slaves from Africa and Europe.  Even learned people are unaware of the slave route from Europe to Africa.  As many as million Europeans were kidnapped and sold into slavery to work in the mines and brothels of North Africa as well as in the galley ships of the Ottoman Empire.  If high school students don't know this, it's because it isn't taught.

It is imperative to teach that not only was slavery a moral atrocity, but it was an economic disaster compared to free labor in free markets.

Brazil and the Caribbean islands received over 90% of slaves in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.  The U.S. received only 3%, and almost none went to Canada.  

[ml/nj]

Southern slavery was the most benign form of slavery in human history, Uncle Tom's Cabin notwithstanding.

ML/NJ

[cowboyusa]

The Slavery system was anti-Free Market.

[jeffersondem]

“It should be taught that slavery was once legal in the US until a Republican, namely Abe Lincoln, was elected president and abolished it.”

By the time the United States abolished slavery, Mr. Lincoln had passed away.

I think it is fine to explain the widely held belief that President Lincoln took up arms to violently overthrow constitutional slavery, or as it is often termed, “fought to free the slaves.”

[Albion Wilde]

bump

[Phlap]

My point is that it was Republicans who abolished slavery yet their descendants seem to have forgotten that fact. Just sayin.