Should Public Schools Ban “Ruby Bridges”? By Jacob G. Hornberger

You’d get rid of all these kind of arguments if there were no public schools. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

A public school in Florida has banned the showing of a Disney movie entitled Ruby Bridges. The movie depicts the horrific ordeal of a 6-year-old Black girl named Ruby Bridges when she integrated public schools in New Orleans in 1960. 

The film has long been shown in Florida public schools as a way to teach children about Black experiences in the South. However, after an outraged parent filed a complaint against the showing of the film, it was banned at a Northshore Elementary School in Pinellas County, Florida. The mother felt that the use of racial slurs in the movie and scenes of white people threatening Ruby “might result in students learning that white people hate Black people.”

Not surprisingly, the matter has turned into a huge controversy, with both sides digging in. One side is saying that the ban is part of a nationwide trend to ban material in public schools that tells the truth about the Black experience. The other side is saying that children shouldn’t be subjected to what they consider are slanted views on race.

How should the controversy be resolved? Actually, there is no way to resolve the controversy in a way that will make everyone happy. That’s because of the system of public schools itself.

Continue reading

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.