Teach Truth in CBSD

Written By C.B. Quoyle

June 10 is a day when teachers across the country speak out against anti-history education bills and make public their pledge to teach the truth.

Since 2021, over a dozen US states have passed laws restricting how educators can teach about the past. Similar restrictions have been proposed in more than 49 states, and in many local school districts. 

This from a joint statement against legislative efforts to restrict education about racism in American History, published by the American Historical Association, June 2021:

“The purpose of education is to serve the common good by promoting open inquiry and advancing human knowledge. Politicians in a democratic society should not manipulate public school curricula to advance partisan or ideological aims.

Knowledge of the past exists to serve the needs of the living. In the current context, this includes an honest reckoning with all aspects of that past.

Americans of all ages deserve nothing less than a free and open exchange about history and the forces that shape our world today, an exchange that should take place inside the classroom as well as in the public realm generally.

To ban the tools that enable those discussions is to deprive us all of the tools necessary for citizenship in the 21st century. A white-washed view of history cannot change what happened in the past.

A free and open society depends on the unrestricted pursuit and dissemination of knowledge.”

AFIE believes that schools engaged in honest, challenging explorations of past and present foster understanding and learning, and produce students who will be better informed citizens and better prepared to engage with the complexities of everyday life.

#TeachTruth

C.B. Quoyle

In 1993, Annie Proulx’s novel The Shipping News was published and won the Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of a newly widowed man who has never known any luck or much love, who moves to Newfoundland with his aunt and two young children. There he finds a home. He writes for the local newspaper and because he’s a good listener and sensitive writer, he is awarded his own column: “The Shipping News.”

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