they wrote a song describing a significant group that was active during Reconstruction. that was the assignment. the topic happened to be the KKK.
i get that we are sensitive to race and other issues in 2018, but taking the outrage up to 11, getting people fired, and making people go away is doing more harm than good. it's a counterproductive over-reach that would be better handled by having long-form conversations with the parties involved and fleshing out the details. are these kids Actual Racists? probability near zero. if they were seriously advocating killing the blacks? probability near zero.
posting a video like this with zero context is hurting more than helping. that's on the media. but it's our responsibility as intelligent citizens to dial down the outrage and figure out the ground truth. what did the assignment actually ask for? we don't know.
what we do know as grown adults is that the KKK is not funny, but we should also know that it's ok to make the mistake of being insensitive without being branded for life over it.
I'm still confused. Why is writing a song ostensibly by the KKK considered important for high school education?
To take a slightly different example, Nazism happened . . . and should be discussed in detail. Absolutely people need to understand the roots of Nazism, the political rise to power, debate about why their message was so popular. But writing/singing a song about killing Jews is not necessary to learn about Nazism, and has no place in a high school classroom.
The idea of the assignment is to show understanding of the topic. Who were the Nazis/KKK; what was their viewpoint; why did people follow them; who did they impact? Those were things that were inserted into the song.
Writing a song is because just reading or listening to a lecutre and and taking a test is boring. Teachers look for ways to get students to engage in classrooms. Same reason we had to do dioramas instead of just a book report. Variety. Other students in the class wrote songs about other topics. It's the holidays and carols are common, that's why she used a christmas carol.
I had my kids act out a play about the quadratic formula. It isn't the NEEDED way to teach that, but kids remembered it.
