Illinois lawmaker requires ‘ABOLISHMENT’ of ‘racist’ historical past lessons till state comes up with extra ‘inclusive’ different

LaShawn Ford, a Democrat within the Illinois Common Meeting, has referred to as for a direct halt of historical past lessons that he claims “result in white privilege and a racist society,” sparking issues over an Orwellian revision of historical past.

“I am calling on the state board of schooling to finish the instructing of historical past and the native faculty districts to take fast motion by eradicating the present historical past books and curriculum practices that unfairly talk our historical past,” Ford mentioned Sunday at an occasion in Evanston, Illinois. His obscure plan requires briefly changing historical past lessons by devoting better consideration to civics and making certain that college students “perceive our democratic course of and the way they will get entangled.”

Ford, who previously taught historical past and coached basketball in Chicago Public Colleges earlier than turning into an actual property dealer and ultimately entering into politics, did not present specifics on how the state’s new historical past curriculum ought to look. He nonetheless launched a invoice final month that might require Illinois faculties to show lessons on the US civil rights motion.

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“We’re involved that present faculty historical past teachings result in white privilege and a racist society,” Ford mentioned. “It prices us as a society in the long term, eternally, once we do not perceive our brothers and sisters that we dwell, work and play with.”

Ford’s proposal comes amid rising controversy over US public faculty historical past curriculums. Republican US Senator Tom Cotton final month launched a invoice to ban faculties from utilizing federal funding to show curriculums based mostly on the New York Instances 1619 Undertaking, which he referred to as “a racially divisive, revisionist account of historical past that denies the noble freedom and equality on which our nation was based.”

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Ford’s radical initiative raised fairly a number of eyebrows on social media, with one Twitter person questioning, “So we’re executed with toppling statues, now we’re going to rewrite historical past?” One other replied with a photograph of ‘1984’ creator George Orwell saying, “Boy, did I name it or what?”

Orwell described the dystopia of his novel: “Each file has been destroyed or falsified, each e book rewritten, each image has been repainted, each statue and road constructing has been renamed, each date has been altered… Historical past has stopped. Nothing exists besides an limitless current during which the Occasion is all the time proper.”

Ford’s concept nonetheless discovered assist on-line, with some commenting that “extremely biased” American lecture rooms had certainly “whitewashed” historical past. And whereas the lawmaker’s workplace actually titled its press launch “Rep. Ford At present in Evanston to Name for the Abolishment of Historical past Lessons in Illinois Colleges,” others nonetheless argued the proposal by no means referred to as to abolish historical past programs outright, however merely to exchange the present curriculum with a extra “inclusive” one.

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