Patrick Wood: Teachers should be able to introduce divisive concepts to students

To The Daily Sun,

Our state representatives have voted to make it improper to teach history that might make a person feel, consciously or unconsciously, that because that person is white, they might be racist.

“No pupil in any public school in this state shall be taught ... [t]hat an individual, by virtue of his or her ... race ... color ... [or] religion ... is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously” [RSA 193:40, I(b)]. This legislation also prohibits teaching that one race, color or religion is superior to another race, color or religion [RSA 193:40, I(a)].

Under this legislation, teaching students about “Manifest Destiny” — which espoused the theory that the United States had the absolute right to conquer the entire continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific — is probably not allowed. Manifest Destiny was the justification for white Americans to force Native Americans off the land they had called home for hundreds of years. It would seem to me that indoctrinating students to believe that the elimination of hundreds of thousands of people was somehow ordained from on high is a clear message that certain people were superior to those Native Americans.

What were our current legislators afraid of when they adopted this legislation? Were they afraid their children might be offended to learn that the history of America is not all perfectly clean but in fact has some very large smudges on it?

We may not be responsible for the actions of our ancestors, but we are responsible for the society in which we live, which is based on those actions. The actions of our representatives who voted for this legislation speak much louder than their letters to the editor.

Patrick Wood

Laconia