Teaching with Controversy: From Charlottesville to Chicago
by Shawn P. Healy, PhD, Democracy Program Director
Mary Ellen and I have posted twice on teaching the events of Charlottesville earlier this month and its aftermath. This piece attempts to localize several of the issues that surfaced there and throughout the country as we collectively make sense of both the past and present in our civics classrooms this fall.
The Illinois high school civics course requirement embeds discussion of current and controversial issues, a pedagogy we have also written about at great length. My initial post on the subject emphasized the importance of issue select when bringing controversy into the classroom. Issues include “…meaningful and timely questions about public problems that deserve both students’ and the public’s attention.”
Charlottesville clearly meets this test, and the issues emanating from these events have local dimensions.
- Alt-right demonstrators in full Nazi regalia parallel local threats to exact the same terror in local communities four decades ago, famously in Skokie, where a significant percentage of local residents were Holocaust survivors, and ultimately here in Chicago at Federal Plaza. There’s also a contemporaneous debate about a statue of and street named after Italo Balbo who served in the Italian Air Force and helped bring Mussolini’s Fascist regime to power.
- Mayors from Baltimore to New Orleans are considering or precipitating the removal of Confederate statues (Mitch Landreau’s speech is a must-read), and Chicago has a Confederate monument of its own at the Oak Woods Cemetery in Grand Crossing. It marks a mass grave of soldiers captured and held at Fort Douglas, and is in proximity to the graves of Ida B. Wells, Jesse Owens, and Harold Washington.
- Speaking of Douglas, we’re referring to Stephen, the man who Lincoln ultimately defeated for the presidency that defended slavery in the form of popular sovereignty. A park in his name in North Lawndale is also being contested by elementary school students from Village Leadership Academy in the South Loop. They have asked the Chicago Park District to add an “s” in honor of Frederick Douglass.
- The Laquan McDonald murder and larger issues of police accountability demand a central place in our local civics classrooms. I salute Chicago Public Schools for developing the Burge curriculum, and urge us to move this conversation to the present as the city grapples with the intertwined challenges of gun violence and lack of trust in the law enforcement community.
- Finally, we must grapple more deeply with institutionalized racism.
- Our partners at the Metropolitan Planning Council published a report in March on the costs of segregation to the region. If levels of white-African-American segregation were on par with the national median:
- Incomes for African-Americans would be nearly $3K/ year higher and regional income $4.4 billion greater (this alone would help resolve many of our fiscal challenges);
- The regional homicide rate would fall by 30%, saving 229 lives;
- And 83,000 more people would have college degrees and expanded earning potential (>$1M per person over the course of a career)
- I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the lingering debate over school funding inequities in Illinois, the most stark in the nation. A pathway to addressing “salvage inequalities” is within sight if our legislators and governor move beyond their respective bases and act to the benefit of all the state’s children.
- Our partners at the Metropolitan Planning Council published a report in March on the costs of segregation to the region. If levels of white-African-American segregation were on par with the national median:
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