Black History Is a Wonderful Place to Teach Critical Thinking

Black history gives older students an opportunity to do something much more sophisticated than memorize dates.

Give students two accounts of the same historical event.

Ask them to compare the language.

Who created each source?

When was it created?

Who was the intended audience?

What does each source emphasize?

What might each author have had reason to leave out?

Then introduce a primary source: a newspaper article, speech, advertisement, photograph, court decision, letter, oral history, or government document.

Students begin to discover that studying history involves examining evidence.

This is especially important when discussing complicated subjects such as slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, migration, protest movements, education, housing, voting rights, and economic opportunity.

Students don't need us to remove every difficult question from history. They need us to teach them how to investigate difficult questions responsibly.

Take-away: Instead of asking only, "What happened?" teach students to ask, "What is the evidence, who created it, and how do we know?"

The Capable Scholar's Black history and critical-thinking resources are designed around this deeper kind of learning: students read, investigate, question, discuss, and write rather than simply memorize.