As Christians who care about human flourishing, even among our littlest neighbors, education is a crucial place that flourishing begins. White students, on the other hand, make up 51% of enrollment, 41% of students referred to law enforcement, and 39% of those arrested. Even though I spent my entire life in public school, I was largely shielded from the realities of desegregation. The White Americans were given social and legal privilege over other races and minorities. In many ways, our fears of the unknown, and bad education continues to shape how we view public education in America. Sign up with your email to receive updates and helpful resources on race. Pray for educational inequity to be dealt with in our country in a redemptive way, where people make choices based on the right desires of the heart, and not because they are forced to comply. How to Teach the History of Racism in Science Class ... A 2018 report in the journal Family Medicine found that health care workers receive little education on medical racism. The article led to a storm, went viral, but was censored after publication, first by a South Africa editor, and then worldwide by those who had reproduced it. To end racism we must first eliminate what sustains it – the racist history in our school texts – by checking facts, and public debate. In the 18th and the 19th centuries, racism was highly practiced in the USA. I was also conflicted. For handpicked stories every day, subscribe to us on Telegram). Submit your letter to the editor at [email protected] or contact us. She is the proud mom of four sons, happy wife to Daniel, and author of three books: The Accidental Feminist, Glory in the Ordinary, and Teach Me to Feel: Worshiping Through the Psalms in Every Season of Life. I'm bothered by my own silence at times as I witness racism. From 1954 to the late 1980s, the rate of black children attending white schools rose tremendously in the South, from 0 percent in 1954, to 43.5 percent by 1988, only declining after the dismantling of court ordered desegregation plans to 23.2 in 2011. We can do more than pray, but we cannot do less. All across the country, and not just in southern states, even after Brown V. Board of Education that took place more than 60 years ago, there is an objectionable presence of racially segregated schools that make it hard for students to interact with peers of other ethnicities and overcome their racial bias. Racism in the United States has its roots since the colonial era. Structural racism is deeply embedded in all areas of society, and medical education is no exception. Many people are not able to choose where their child will go to school. The official NCERT response was that no primary evidence is needed, since “superior” Western texts all mention Euclid, and Indians cannot question those “superior” texts. Under what conviction was this school birthed? Schooling in the United States has a history driven by racialization and racism. Given that this “Euclid” was from Alexandria in Africa, how exactly do we know his skin colour, or his sex? This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. For example, our current Class 9 NCERT school math text shows children an image of a white-skinned Euclid, declared the father of geometry. Christians once helped keep children of different ethnicities separate. Ask any member of your church what they think about education, and they likely have a different answer and solution. This precipitated the 2015 anti-racism protests known as #RhodesMustFall, which toppled the statue of Cecil Rhodes (of “Rhodes scholarship” fame) in Cape Town, though the statue still stands in Oxford. In India, The Wire and the Scroll.in took it down, though The Wire put it back. By the mid-1960s, the northern education establishment had embraced the elimination of blatant racism in textbooks, but the main rationale for making changes was now helping black students feel good about their heritage. People suspected this educational “assessment” merely reflected the racist prejudices of the faculty. The History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools should be required reading for all people who work in education. Pray for wisdom in how you talk about education and its history in our country. Left to themselves, people often choose what they prefer or what is best for them alone. Institutional racism doesn’t just affect adults but children in K-12 schools as well. But in order to grow in our understanding of the struggles of racial injustice in our country, we would do well to listen and learn about a topic that sometimes makes us squirm—desegregation, busing, and the rise of private schools. After some digging, I realized what busing meant and was surprised. Brown v. Board was a case of great importance in which the United State Supreme Court decided that laws establishing separate schools for black and white students was unconstitutional. Racism is a systematized form of oppression which is developed by members of one race in order to persecute members of another race. ), (The Quint is available on Telegram. Not only were many of our top institutions founded by slave owners and rooted in racist policies, but they have systematically excluded people of color for centuries. Further, the useful version of the Pythagorean calculation, as found in African and Indian string geometry (Manava sulba sutra 10.10), involves square roots, known to Egyptians and Indians but unknown to Greeks, who lacked even fractions. But students should also learn about Una Marson, a black feminist fighting racism in Britain in the 1940s. Setting aside the persistent … Our current calendar, based on its 1582 Gregorian reform, still uses leap years instead of precise fractions, hence gets the tropical year right only on a thousand-year average: not from year to year. I had to tell a moving story of a small school’s rise to success. The image is a Caucasian stereotype; when confronted, the NCERT changed the image: still Caucasian, but no longer a stereotype! Schools don’t achieve an “F” rating in a year. Afrocentrists assert that the achievements of black Egyptians were wrongly attributed to white Greeks. Racism persists because our education system inculcates racist values. Education is a polarizing topic. Education is a polarizing topic. A quick look at the origins of racism in modern society from its roots in the justification of slavery. Following the #RhodesMustFall agitation, a 2016 article in The Conversation reiterated that “Euclid” was actually a black woman. These things take decades to form. The extent and the targets of racist attitudes in Great Britain have varied over the course of time. To satisfy the labor needs of the rapidly growing North American colonies, white European settlers turned in the early 17th century from indentured servants (mostly poorer Europeans) to a cheaper, more plentiful labor source: enslaved Africans. That was over a decade ago. But with our choices must come recognition of privilege. The “truth” in history is an amalgam of names, places, dates, and events. We also have to wrestle with how our own choices contribute to the racist history of racism. 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