Substitute Teacher Goes Rogue, Conducts "Mock Slave Auction" at NJ School

[Anna Komnene]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mock-slave-auction-new-jersey_us_58d1d687e4b02d33b746c2cf

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[Anna Komnene]

They made African Americans perform a mock slave auction, with the white children selling them.  If you don't find anything wrong with that, you have some problems.

The original story does not claim or imply anything like that.

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The exercise was initiated by students, who "asked" their classmates to participate in their presentation.

This appears to be an example of parents indulging in melodramatics over something that did not bother any of the students involved, local media making hay over it, and national media picking up the story. It was not a middle school re-enactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

It's hard to say whether students were bothered by it.  People are complicated.  There's been plenty of times throughout my life where someone did something that hurt me but I just smiled and said "okay."  Doesn't mean I didn't go in my room and cry afterwards.  Who knows?  Some students might even tease each other about it.  Why encourage that?

Even if it was the student's idea, the teacher could have stepped in.  They are the authority figure and need to be able to guide the students about what is acceptable behavior and what isn't.  Obviously it's awkward if they came up with the idea, but they could have just as easily done the project without actually using their classmates as the examples.  Also, it's problematic that only the black children were used as the slaves in this project.  It reinforces social divisions when people need to be coming together.  Students need to be taught about history, including the slave trade, but they don't need to be identifying each other as who would be the slave and who would be the master if this was 1786.

[Anna Komnene]

Well yeah, they know who would be the slaves, but thinking about a topic in the abstract and literally pointing to a child in the classroom and saying "you would be the slave" are completely different things.  One entails "my ancestors were the slaves" while the other entails "I am the slave."  Those two thought processes have a lot of different implications.  Learning about this can just as easily be accomplished by watching the movie "Roots" or reading The Color Purple.  I had to do both of those in school, and they were both pretty eye opening and taught me a lot about the issue, and they didn't involve me othering the black students in my class by thinking about them as potential slaves for my nonexistent plantation (though considering the racial makeup of my classes, I might have actually been the slave on their plantations... but whatever).

Another thing is that actually conducting a mock auction has a lot of other social implications than just race.  I mean, the whole point of an auction is to assess the value of a commodity, and in this case, the commodity in question is a human being.  That means allowing and even encouraging students to say things like "Jamaal is worth more than Derrick because he's bigger, and stronger.  He'd be a much better at picking my potatoes."  or  "I'll pay 50 dollars for Suzie because she's really pretty, but meh Naomi is only worth 3 dollars because she's kinda chubby and and has a crooked nose."  What could possibly go wrong with putting students in a situation where they are asked to think about human beings in that manner?

I do agree about schools being too restrictive.  I actually did some substitute teaching when I was about 19 and 20 to help pay the bills, and it might have been the job that I was most unhappy doing that I've ever had.  I was constantly afraid of acting like a normal human being and saying something that might get me in trouble or fired.  But even though that is a problem, the reason why it exists is because education is fundamental to shaping worldviews.  So yes, there will always be debate or outrage over teachers expressing views to the malleable minds of children that the community disagrees with.  It's over the top, yeah, but it also means that we don't want our children turning into the Nazi youth league or New Age KKK Revival.  It's hard to find that balance and most school districts lean way too far on the side of censorship, but letting anything be fair game is objectively awful too.