Personal Take: Lack of inclusion in Public Education makes minorities more susceptible to Disinformation
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the fate of young Black people in the education system. Sometimes I wonder how any Black person matriculates through our education system with their sanity intact. Admittedly, my concern is drawn from my own experience as a Black child in school. What I’d like to draw attention to is how early Black children are made to understand the contradictions between mainstream history and the truth.
My father has a PhD in Sociology and my mother was a teacher before changing professions and becoming a nurse. That being said, I was surrounded and raised by people who were educated and understood American history from different perspectives. Therefore, I knew a lot of history before I ever got to school and it was jarring to have one understanding of history, while my teacher in class was teaching something completely different. Every now and then I would answer a history question factually on a test only to be told that it wasn’t the correct answer. Not that the answer wasn’t factually correct, but that it wasn’t the answer that was expected on the test. This was a recurring theme throughout my early years in school, until my parents made me understand when I’m given a test, I should put down the answer that is expected regardless of what I know to be true.
This is jarring for a child (or at least it was for me) because school is sold to children as somewhere that knowledge and truth is transferred. But at a very young age Black children in particular are exposed to the ugly truth that there is an “official” story of American history and then there is reality, which is much different.
In schools across the nation, history books often minimize the reality of slavery and the contribution of minorities to the development of America as a great nation. This only intensifies the disproportionate effects of poverty, lower quality schools, and harsher penalties for misbehavior. These are some of the challenges Black children carry on top of the normal stresses of growing up in the K-12 years.
I believe the realization and knowledge of being misinformed in school stunts a student’s ability to buy in to the educational experience. Additionally, it stunts student’s ability to perform research because instead of schools teaching them to rely on primary sources of information, the school experience teaches minority students to be distrustful of primary sources, making them more susceptible and vulnerable to “alternative information” or disinformation.
On the whole, the education system tends to reinforce the ideas that White men in particular were almost exclusively responsible for progress in America, while giving minimal coverage to the achievements of minorities. It has been said that this lack of diversity and inclusion in education makes it difficult for minorities to see themselves as contributing and successful groups in America’s history. I believe it goes further than that, for those minority students who have been exposed to other accounts of history which reflect the contributions of minorities, or which directly contradict the accounts covered in school; it antagonizes them and makes them more distrustful of the school experience than they otherwise would be. These attitudes contribute to low educational achievement or cause students to drop out who otherwise would not.
Concrete measurable conditions such as poverty, lower quality schools, and bias in disciplinary action, form powerful barriers to closing the educational opportunity gap in America. I believe an additional consequence which is less covered is that for Black children disinformation starts in school. Since school is viewed as an arm of the state, it combines with other socioeconomic factors to drive down minority participation in society and increase the disconnect between the Black experience and mainstream society.
Taken together with other better covered conditions, such as overzealous law enforcement, lack of equitable healthcare, and income inequality, antagonism from the public education system contributes to a theme across American cultural institutions that Black existence is not valued. If this condition is not addressed, I believe it could make minorities disproportionately susceptible to disinformation.