How dare them expose the fact that blacks were previously denied the right to vote and the legal ability to participate in the economy of their local communities, all before the adults in the lives of those first graders can indoctrinate them as to the innate inferiority of blacks. The shock! The gall! The horror!
I suspect that the poster's point was that in first grade the curriculum would have to go to a lot of trouble to explain what 'the right to vote' was (well, what a 'vote' was, for that matter), some inkling of what 'the legal ability to participate in the economy of their local communities' was (what is an economy? what is a legal ability?), and the historical and political circumstances surrounding blacks before and after the Civil War.
Whereas they could have spent the time learning how to tell time or something and have gotten a lot more use out of it.
First, most white childrens' impressions of blacks come from interacting with black children--not all of whom, unfortunately, are at any one time candidates for sainthood any more than white kids are. And of those which are distinctly not candidates for sainthood, most have had racist inculcation before ever they set foot in school. Any effective racist indoctrination to which a child, white or black, might be subject is pretty likely to occur before school, rather than after first grade. "Education" is not a magic bullet for eliminating racisim.Secondly, a first-grader is not going to have any context to digest the information about racism; that information standing alone is a half-truth. It is a half-truth because not only didn't enslaved blacks have full standing as voting citizens before 1860, not only didn't women have the vote until about 1920, but nearly all the ancestors of nearly all Americans, however white and male they were, had no voice in government. The truth of America is not the hole in the donut, it is the donut itself--the fact that equality before the law is vastly improved over the past. And that equality before the law had to be invented here.
The big picture of American freedom is glorious, and what we now see as the dark portions of the past merely illustrate how easy it was for things to be worse than they now are.
The big picture of American prosperity is glorious; if you are at the "poverty line" now you're more prosperous than my middle-class family was in 1950. In fact that prosperity compares with what the salary of the president of the United States would have bought two centuries ago.
To teach first graders to take the big picture for granted and focus only on the negative is manipulative. In fact, it is exactly what a journalist does, and you cannot learn history from a newspaper. Time enough to learn the details and caveats of history after you have some concept of the big picture.
"How dare them expose the fact that blacks were previously denied the right to vote and the legal ability to participate in the economy of their local communities, all before the adults in the lives of those first graders can indoctrinate them as to the innate inferiority of blacks. The shock! The gall! The horror!"
LOL, save us the drama queen hysterics. But then again you wouldn't think anything odd about a six year-old having to "learn" about the slightly complicated dynamics of the American 'Civil Right Movement,'would you?
And what else would you have them be taught? The Prohibition Act ?? Or how about the dynamics of the Sedition Act?
And maybe later on after dinner ( bowl of Spaghetti-O's) Junior and Dad can "discuss" how the Kennedy Assassination affected the Civil Right Movement over a cigar and snort of brandy...
I think the point is about age-appropriateness. I'm sure we all agree that homosexuality and beastiality should be taught in kindergarten / first grade, followed by civil rights / politically correct racism no later than second grade. First things first, after all.
I'm afraid that you are ignorant of the agenda in play. The purpose of the classes on the Civil Rights movement is only tangentially about the difficulties suffered by blacks. Its actual purpose is to instill white guilt. The leftest elites who control academia, media, politics, and law in America view the white middle class as the single major obstacle to the enactment of their socialist utopia. This group (the white middle class) harbors cultural, religious, and political ideas which are anathema to the elite liberals.
As a result, the leftist elites have chosen to pursue the methodology of Antonio Gramsci. He was an Italian socialist who argued that communists must infiltrate the institutions of culture and deconstruct the culture, religion, and traditions of the people in question. Thus disconnected from their roots, the masses would be alienated and ripe for the political agenda of the socialists.
The bombardment of middle class white children in america with hatred and shame for their religion, ancestors, and culture is the method by which this recalcitrant demographic will surrender to the ideological program of the leftist elites.