| So took a chance to Google the quoted phrase attributed to Cotton. It comes from an interview to Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, in context: >In the interview, Cotton said the role of slavery can’t be overlooked. >“We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can’t understand our country. As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction,” he said. >Instead of portraying America as “an irredeemably corrupt, rotten and racist country,” the nation should be viewed “as an imperfect and flawed land, but the greatest and noblest country in the history of mankind,” Cotton said. https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2020/jul/26/bill-by-cott... via https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/tom-cotton-slavery-necessa... One common historical argument (I think I got it from H. W. Brands' biography of Benjamin Franklin that I read recently), is that there would had been no union at all if the southern states (with slavery) were not accommodated. Of course, any decision about a school curriculum excludes other curriculums, unless one chooses to deliberately cover all aspects of debate of any debated school subject, or take an anarchist attitude of no imposed curriculum by the state, giving total control individual teachers or maybe parents themselves. In Finland, teachers have quite much autonomy as long as the minimum standards of vaguely specified curriculum is adhered to, which is more "free speech compatible" in some sense, but that comes with failure modes too. (I had quite professional teachers in my time, but I recall reading a complaints about politically partisan teachers. System like is prone to have issues because while government schools are, in theory, part of the democratically governed system, the actual decisions about education and choice of teachers are quite many hoops and levels of hierarchy removed from the kids and the parents themselves.) |