SC students are hungry for information so allow their teachers to teach | Opinion

When I heard that former president Donald Trump was nearly assassinated, I was in Washington, D.C., at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a memorial to assassinated President John F. Kennedy. I was with a group of high school social studies teachers taking part in Teachers of Government, a program hosted by Furman University’s Riley Institute to enhance civics education in South Carolina. The news that the shooter was just two years out of high school underscored that teachers are on the front lines of preserving our democracy.

For days prior, the group had been discussing how to teach youth about government in today’s polarized political and media environments. Several participants felt caught in a culture war because of legislation designed to curb the instruction of certain content, including the history of race in the United States.

Underpinning such legislation is the implicit assumption that teachers are indoctrinating students. Yet the teachers I met — representing demographically and politically diverse districts like Richland County One and Lancaster County — primarily focus on helping students understand and show interest in local and state government, not pushing political agendas.

They want students to become engaged citizens who think beyond their immediate context and don’t resort to “Well, my mama says …” as the basis for their positions.

Wanting to teach such critical thinking skills is in keeping with the stated goals of the Profile of the South Carolina Graduate, developed in 2012 by school superintendents and adopted by South Carolina’s Board of Education, Department of Education, Education Oversight Committee, Chamber of Commerce and others with an interest in our students’ and state’s success.

If we help teachers provide robust social studies instruction, they can help students develop the ability to think critically and independently. When history is taught effectively and openly, students learn their textbooks are not collections of neutral facts, but stories woven out of primary sources.

It’s incumbent upon us all as critical thinkers to understand the context in which those sources were created, assess their biases, empathize with the individuals who generated them and ultimately pass moral judgment about whose story we will trust and value more.

Critical thinking is also necessary to develop media literacy — a challenge to teachers because a lack of it is the greatest threat to a functioning, cooperative society.

If we don’t allow teachers to help students evaluate information critically and weigh some perspectives as more valid than others, then how do we expect young people to navigate the modern news landscape? They won’t. They will believe everything, nothing (conspiracy thinking), or, given the sophistication of algorithms, only what fits into their worldview.

As our week in Washington drew to a close, I stood at the National Museum for African American History and Culture and was struck by the prescience of the inscription in the fountain, a quote from James Baldwin: “I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

I’d say we’re due some honest assessment. We owe it to ourselves to teach the history and state of race in this country as a complex construction of social and legal practices, attitudes and beliefs that didn’t just vanish with the end of slavery or Jim Crow. We owe our children an education that helps them realize we all exist within social structures and systems that produce more favorable outcomes for some than for others. This isn’t about placing blame or inducing guilt. It’s about understanding the complexity of human societies and systems and how to navigate them cooperatively.

Reflecting on the political violence enacted by Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Crooks, I wonder: What did he learn in school — or what wasn’t he taught — that convinced him not to trust the democratic process and to resort to violence instead?

Our country is full of young people who are both impressionable and hungry for information to make sense of the world. We have to trust and support our teachers to provide that education.