News - World: US educators' proposal to use "involuntary relocation" instead of slavery to avoid upsetting school students has been rejected.

The Texas State Board of Education on Thursday rejected the request by a workgroup of educators, who had proposed referring to slavery as “involuntary relocation” in second-grade classrooms, to reconsider their proposal.

The workgroup assigned for the task consisted of nine educators, including teachers, social studies specialists, instructional coaches and a professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and was one of many such groups advising the state education board a year after lawmakers passed a law to keep topics that make students “feel discomfort” out of Texas classrooms.

“The board -- with unanimous consent -- directed the work group to revisit that specific language,” Keven Ellis, chair of the Texas State Board of Education said in a statement.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a history professor at Harvard University, said using “involuntary relocation” as a euphemism to describe slavery threatens to blur out what actually happened during that time in history.

“Young kids can grasp the concept of slavery and be kidnapped into it,” Gordon-Reed said. “The African slave trade is unlike anything that had or has happened, the numbers and distance.”

Gordon-Reed insisted the unnecessary use of the proposed language euphemisms and double talk should be avoided in classrooms.

If language like what the group of Texas educators proposes is accepted and taught to children, it means the country is moving in the wrong direction, she pointed out.

“Tell children the truth. They can handle it,” she said.

The Texas State Board of Education, which has some 8,866 public schools under its supervision, develops a new curriculum for social studies every ten years to update what children should be learning.

However, the Texas State Board of Education has become heavily politicized, from lawmakers passing legislation on how race and slavery should be taught in schools to conservative political action committees pouring large amounts of money to put more conservatives on school boards who promise to get rid of curriculum and programs they consider divisive and which make White children in the classrooms feel uncomfortable due to their White forefather's atrocities against the blacks.

It is estimated that there were 250,000 slaves in Texas before slavery was abolished in the United States.

African American writer and journalist Abayomi Azikiwe says the United States was “founded on racism and national oppression”, however, Republicans oppose to schools teaching about the "history of racism".

Source: Press TV