Is race too offensive to be taught?

This year, Alan Barron, a middle school history teacher, resumed his job after being put on administrative leave due to his controversial method of teaching race. During one of his classes, he showed the class a video of white entertainers putting on blackface for their theatrical acts. A school administrator observed his class and took offense. After Barron was called to the main office, he was taken out of school. He spent two weeks in an administrate gulag, which is a place where you are discouraged from expressing your opinions. This is because his teaching methods went against the education bureaucracy. During, an interview however, Barron pointed out that as a history teacher, sometimes you need to teach things that happened that are offensive. He named off Racism, the Crucifixion, wars, and Japanese-American internment during World War II as things that were offensive, but also as things that all happened, noting “You don’t skip history because it might offend.” And apparently, the parents of the students he was teaching agreed. After the students reported to their parents what had happened to him, they got upset because they all knew he was a good teacher and didn’t want to see him go. One mother, whose daughter and husband were black, and whose father was from Iraq, said that she wasn’t offended, and that Barron shouldn’t have gotten in trouble for showing something that happened. This led to the idea that schools are just ignoring certain parts of history that might offend. After all the parents got together to protest, Barron was allowed to return to teaching.

All of this really makes you wonder- why did the school want to skip over parts of history that might want to be considered offensive. Like it or not, the students need to learn that some bad stuff has happened in the world at some point, and it’s better for them to learn it early so they can better prepare themselves for taking on the world later in life. We can’t just act like everything in life is perfect no matter how much we want to believe it. I don’t think it was right for the teacher to be sent to the gulag because he was just doing his job. I hope this is something that doesn’t happen that often, because people shouldn’t get in trouble for teaching events that they had no control over.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-06-05/news/ct-kass-met-0605-20140605_1_history-school-administrator-segregation