History Buff Challenges Curriculum



Lori Glenn

MOULTRIE — This week before the school board, a local history buff challenged
the curriculum taught in Colquitt County Schools about the American Civil War.

Keith Taylor of Lee’s Cadets represented about 20 parents of local children
— members in Lee’s Cadets and the Order of the Confederate Rose
— when he criticized history textbooks used at the high school and at
the middle school level for teaching inaccuracies. Lee’s Cadets, a Southern
heritage boy’s camp, has about 140 members in South Georgia and North
Carolina.

“I understand that the federal government mandates what the state can
teach, and the state has to pass down what the federal government gives them.
And I understand there are situations in the school where we can’t get
the textbook pulled, but teachers do have the right to elaborate, to add. As
long as they’re teaching the curriculum, they can expand on the curriculum
and add more to it,” Taylor said.

“… In the books that we’re seeing coming out now and in the past
few years, it’s like they’re give you the history but they’re
giving you a part of the history. It’s like the statements in them are
giving you a leading statement,” he said.

Regarding the Battle of Olustee where Union soldiers were attempting to cut
the rail supply near Lake City, Fla., for instance, he said, official records
indicate the Confederacy won overwhelmingly and spared Tallahassee from being
taken by the Union. Yet, textbooks at the Colquitt County High School are teaching
that it was a Union victory, he said.

Another discrepancy is a middle school book’s interpretation of Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation. Taylor said that the history book teaches that the
proclamation freed all U.S. slaves, but that’s not so. Taylor said it
was an attempt on Lincoln’s part to instigate a slave insurrection.

“We’ve asked teachers if they’ve ever read it, and they said
no, they only buy what they’re taught in college to get their teacher’s
certificate. When teachers read it, they realize that it freed no slaves. …
What it says in simple terms is that Lincoln was going to free all the slaves
in all the territories of all the states in rebellion with the exception of
territories that were occupied by Union troops (in which) the state of slavery
stayed as it was. So in other words, he was freeing all the slaves in the country
of the Confederate States of America.

“That would be like President Bush saying — and I’m going
to use an example a friend of mine uses — that the country of Mexico cannot
sell tacos any more. At that time, since we were a separate nation, his ruling
had no effect,” Taylor said.

He and the local group of parents are concerned that in teaching about the
Civil War the textbooks address the slavery issue but never get into the taxation
issue of the war, he said.

Lincoln signed a proposed 13th Amendment that was presented to the Confederacy
two months prior to the beginning of the war that outlined a deal that if the
segregated states would rejoin the Union and pay import/export taxes of 60 to
70 percent, Lincoln would leave the slavery issue alone, Taylor said.

The Confederate states didn’t want to be “taxed to death,”
he said, and declined the proposal.

“Back in the early 1990s, people knew about this document,” said
Taylor who has read the original at the National Archives. “They’ve
taken it out of the textbooks because it explains the main situation for the
war.”

Lee’s Cadets also has issue with the local practice of using the Hollywood
movie “Glory” as a teaching aide. The docudrama tribute chronicles
the efforts of one of the first black units in the war, the 54th Massachusetts
volunteer regiment.

“They’re using it and testing kids on things that they’ve
learned from that film,” he said. “Our whole point is we’re
not just arguing about the information about the War between the States. That
just happens to be an area that a lot of us into Southern history read and research.
That’s where we find errors. Other sections of the book — we’re
afraid they are filled with errors as well, but they’re not areas that
we know much about,” he said.

“… Our main concern from our organizational standpoint from the Lee’s
Cadet Corps, we try to teach true history. We teach the good, the bad and the
ugly. We teach the bad side of the Confederacy and the good side. We don’t
teach anything that we can’t prove in fact,” Taylor said. “From
a Lee’s Cadet Corps standpoint, we want to make sure that youth of the
South — white, black, yellow, pink, purple and polka-dotted — get
all the information to make their own decisions.”

In response, Colquitt County Superintendent Leonard McCoy reserved comment until
he receives more information he said he expects from Taylor.

On The Web:
http://www.moultrieobserver.com/local/local_story_059220040.html?start:int=15