In the News

It’s often unsettling to confront new knowledge and see our world in new ways. When our ordered paradigms are found to be less true than we thought, we are cast adrift in a chaotic reality. Consider Galileo and others like him when they found the earth was not at the center of the universe but just one of many bodies orbiting around one of many stars. Or, reflect on the United States when the theory of natural selection in evolution reached our shores...

For centuries, dead white men have dominated high school English classes. Syllabuses and summer readings lists are chock-full of Shakespeares, Hemingways, Faulkners, and Fitzgeralds.

But this year, Joana Chacon, an English teacher at Newton South High School, is trying something new: Like many in her department, Chacon is teaching texts only by authors of color. Freshmen will read “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros and civil rights poetry by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou. Juniors will dive into Sherman Alexie’s bildungsroman, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian,” Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel “American Born Chinese," and one of Toni Morrison’s searing early works, “The Bluest Eye” or “Song of Solomon.”

Social studies and history education organizations, and many teachers, criticized the president's statements yesterday after he condemned history classes that include lessons on systemic racism for teaching what he called "lies" and "left-wing indoctrination."... The Zinn Education Project, which offers lessons and professional development based on Zinn's approach to history, also issued a statement saying that the Trump administration "seek[s] to squash ... the power of a growing number of teachers who teach outside the textbook."

This week President Trump described the work of the legendary historian Howard Zinn, who died in 2010, as “propaganda” meant to “make students ashamed of their own history.” But Zinn believed the opposite, that teaching the unvarnished truth about history was the best way to combat propaganda and unexamined received wisdom. We air excerpts from a 2009 interview with Zinn in which he explained his approach to education. “We should be honest with young people; we should not deceive them. We should be honest about the history of our country,” Zinn said.

Progressive educators and historians fired back on Friday a day after President Donald Trump took aim at the late historian Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project, and vowed to "restore patriotic education" in American schools he accused of teaching "hateful lies about this country."

Historian Nishani Frazier and social studies teacher Adam Sanchez talk about how to separate fact from fiction in civil rights teaching.

As the uprisings for racial justice continue through the summer, they are shedding light on just how much our classrooms whitewash U.S. history and leave out important narratives of Black and Indigenous people, and other histories of people of color. Over the last few weeks, some people, particularly white people, are now realizing they weren’t taught certain aspects of U.S. history, such as the Tulsa race massacre, or how redlining segregated many U.S. cities, and this has prompted many to rethink about how we teach history in this country and how to fix it.

On this edition of Your Call, we’ll speak with educators about how they teach subjects not taught or taught inaccurately today’s US history books. With Black Lives Matter actions happening across the country and the removal of statues depicting racist history, how do teachers plan to use this moment to educate students about the true history of this country?