Middle School Project Asks Kids To Defend Slavery

[MissusDe]

(CBS) CALDWELL, N.J. Two local middle school teachers are in hot water after assigning students a controversial project on slavery that's angered parents.

Over 100 sixth graders at Grover Cleveland Middle School in Caldwell spent several days last week taking part in an assignment where they used terms like "build a plantation" while completing their "Lap of Luxury" social studies project.

The project instructed students to create an advertisement defending the use of slave labor to run a newly built plantation in South Carolina. Students are told to come up with a '"catchy" name for the plantation and give three reasons why slave labor is the "best idea" and to add illustrations.

One student, who is not being identified because of his age, read to CBS 2 what he wrote for the assignment: "Slave labor is the way to go because slaves aren't paid, so all money is profit."

Parents are astonished by the assignment's nature.

"It's really offending," said Tyiesha Hameed, whose child is one of the only eight black students who attends the school. "There's so many other ways and tools to show our kids how to learn and teach them in reference to slavery."

One question parents and officials are asking is whether the 11- and 12-year-olds even understand the lesson which was given to them.

"The students have to use their creative spirits to create justification. That gets the mind pretty worked up, and it embeds some things in their process that will be there for forever," said James Harris, president of the New Jersey NAACP chapter.

Casey Shorter, the school's principal, said he didn't find out about the project until after he spoke with a concerned parent. "Our intent was not to be insensitive. After reviewing the assignment and listening to feedback, from an administrative and teaching perspective, we determined it was insensitive and inappropriate. And we will eliminate it from the curriculum," he said.

Citing privacy issues, Shorter would not say what he's done with Dana Howarth and Beth Rutzler, the two language arts teachers who created the controversial "Lap of Luxury" project. He adds this is actually the second year that the teachers have given the assignment.

http://wcbstv.com/local/local_story_275172255.html

[Michael Tee]

<<One student, who is not being identified because of his age, read to CBS 2 what he wrote for the assignment: "Slave labor is the way to go because slaves aren't paid, so all money is profit.">>

Is there really any reason why this opinion CAN'T be discussed in class?  Seems like there's a lot to be learned in a free-wheeling discussion on these remarks, by all parties.  Grade 8s aren't stupid.

[kimba1]

it is a good topic to talk about
ex. how many business that require slaves then exist now?
how can a business that has such a low overhead in labor not have cash reserves to exist without slaves later on

[MissusDe]

This is what I found troubling:

Casey Shorter, the school's principal, said he didn't find out about the project until after he spoke with a concerned parent. "Our intent was not to be insensitive. After reviewing the assignment and listening to feedback, from an administrative and teaching perspective, we determined it was insensitive and inappropriate. And we will eliminate it from the curriculum," he said.

So does that mean no one is reviewing curriculum before it reaches the students?  I've always been under the assumption that one of the responsibilities of a school administrator was to do just that.

Also, I know that middle school can be an especially difficult time for teachers to engage their students, and in that struggle they may introduce what they believe to be creative solutions.  Without knowing the project guidelines, it's hard to pass judgment on it...I might not object if it encouraged the students to examine the pros and cons of slavery.

[Plane]

Reminds me of the third wave project.

[_JS]

<<One student, who is not being identified because of his age, read to CBS 2 what he wrote for the assignment: "Slave labor is the way to go because slaves aren't paid, so all money is profit.">>

Is there really any reason why this opinion CAN'T be discussed in class?  Seems like there's a lot to be learned in a free-wheeling discussion on these remarks, by all parties.  Grade 8s aren't stupid.

I tend to agree. I've read some really creative methods of teaching/discussing the history of South Africa and especially apartheid.

It can always help to see that groups in history that carried out some of the most inhumane evils, were not so larger than life that they should be seen as non-human. The Nazis were people. Slave-owners were people. Stalinists were people. Many of these people even felt justified, sometimes divinely, in what they were doing.

I could see this as being a similar lesson. Of course I don't know the particulars of it at all.

[Xavier_Onassis]

If slavery was so damned profitable, how was it that the South (where there were slaves all over the place) did not win the war with the North?

The fact that you could buy slaves meant that there were few incentives to create labor-saving devices. Even the most useful of all the inventions used in the South, the cotton gin, was invented by a Northerner.

There was little industry in the South, because the wealth was in the hands of a few slaveholders on plantations, and they could buy whatever they wanted. The poor either bought used or made do without. Most Southerners were poor, uneducated and backward.

Slavery was taught at a perfectly normal thing in the Bible. Jesus had very little to say against it.

Jefferson Davis' brother had a model plantation on an island in the Mississippi where the entire affair was run by slaves working for a Black overseer. It was touted as sort of a cotton-producing Eden. The slaves were clothed and housed and fed, and it was said that they were lots better off than any of their ancestors were in Africa, where they could have been captured by the cruel Portuguese, or boiled in a pot by cannibals.


The Civil War was the only war even more stupid than the present Iraq War. It set the South back 40 years at least and beggared the North for fifteen or so. Had they just let the slaves call themselves free, it would have gradually evolved into a better society, but without all the casualties, disease and starvation.

[kimba1]

thanks xo that explains alot
slavery would tend to get in the way of creativity
complacency hardly helps inovation.

[Xavier_Onassis]

If we create a perfect and stable society, there will be little creativity, and all change will be seen as a threat, which of course, it is.

China during the last dynasty, up to the Boxer Rebellion was sort of like this. Railroads, electricity were opposed. One reason is that they came from abroad, but there is no way they could have come from China, as China did not have the technology.

Following this came the Sun-Yatsen Republic and the Kuomingtang, which wanted progress from within China. Then the Japanese invaded.

The Perfect State and all manifestations of it (Communism, The Second Coming, the Millineum, whatever), are bad ideas.

What human society does is evolve. Permanence and total stability are always the enemies of progress.

Slavery did not exist because slaveholders were evil. It was a solution to the problem of finding the labor to turn the land into cotton factories, which would in turn, pay to develop huge tracts of fertile land. But at the same time slavery was a block to progress.

Northern factory workers were upon occasion treated worse than slaves. There is certainly not anything like the Ludlow Massacre that happened on any plantation.

The popular image of slavery and the antebellum South is inaccurate and vastly oversimplified.

Somewhere between the idealized Tara of Gone with the Wind and the modern history books, and vastly more complicated, lies the truth.

It's like all scholars agree that Jesus had to be born no later than 6 BC, but never is this heard in any church.
The story of the messiah that started the rebellion that drove the Romans out of Palestine (only for them to return for a royal reaming ending in Massada) is never heard, even though it happened between the Crucifixion and the time in which the Gospels were written is ignored.

[kimba1]

wouldn`t a RBE have that effect?

[fatman]

God forbid that kids should be taught to empathize, or to see a situation from an opposing view (albeit an immoral one).  I guess we should just have lock-stepping robots who can't think for themselves, rather than learning some critical thinking skills at an early age.

I play a game called Europa Universalis, it takes place during the end of the Renaissance up until the fall of Napoleon, and deals mostly with colonizing.  You pick a nation (there are over a hundred) and play that nation up until the end of the game.  One of the main trade goods in the game in Africa is slaves, and there are a lot of people upset by that, no matter how accurate it is.  I like the game because of its accuracy, I don't think that playing that game where slaves are available in any way diminishes the horrors of slavery, but that's evidently the point of some people.

[kimba1]

ever heard of the game rail baron?
for some reason that popped in my head

[_JS]

It's like all scholars agree that Jesus had to be born no later than 6 BC, but never is this heard in any church.

I've certainly heard that in Church. Believe it or not, not every church holds fundamentalist views. Catholicism, for example, is not the tyrannical bastion of anti-science and reactionary thought that many myths make it out to be. It was a Catholic Priest who discovered the Big Bang Theory. Theistic Evolution is a perfectly acceptable belief in Catholicism (and I daresay, the one most commonly held). Historical and archaeological evidence is encouraged and often used in interpretations.

That isn't to say that there aren't people within the Church with opposing views, but I don't think it is fair to lump everyone into one category.

[Xavier_Onassis]

It's not that people in the Church don't KNOW about the contradictions and actual history. I suppose some of them may preach about it, too, but only very, very rarely.

I know that not all Catholics are fundamentalists.

[hnumpah]

Slavery was taught at a perfectly normal thing in the Bible. Jesus had very little to say against it.

Seems he was all for it.

Matthew 10:24.  "A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a slave above his master."

Matthew 24:45.  "Who then is the faithful and sensible slave whom his master put in charge of his household to give them their food at the proper time?
46.  "Blessed is that slave whom his master finds so doing when he comes."

Luke 17:7.  "Which of you, having a slave plowing or tending sheep, will say to him when he has come in from the field, `Come immediately and sit down to eat'?
9.  "He does not thank the slave because he did the things which were commanded, does he?"