A comment from @HilliTech:

This may be a recent issue that's making the rounds, but I at 32 years old can say my high school social studies class specifically downplayed slavery. The Tennessee curriculum included Jim Crow and the KKK, but the opinion of the teacher won out and was on full display.

The teacher taught us impressionable kids that the Civil War was about "states rights" and "a stolen election" where Lincoln didn't actually win, but the north inflated his count. Wild that these statements in my freshman class in 2005 rings eerily similar to the election deniers and ignorant people of today.

Education is important, and *everything* your child is taught will reflect in their future, even history, which is typically downplayed as a necessary evil with no consequence. The kind of nonsense taking place in Florida and Texas is dangerous and must be stopped.

When I learned about the Civil War in middle/high school in WI in the 80s, "states rights" and slavery were taught as the main causes of the war. But much of what I knew about slavery as a kid came from a book I got from the Scholastic Book Club about Harriet Tubman. I read it several times and from what I remember, it didn't hold back in terms of how slave owners treated enslaved people — there was none of that benevolent paternalism bullshit. I wonder a lot about how different my beliefs might be if I hadn't read that book (along with a few others, like 1984 when I was 10).