“George Washington was a good man.” At least, so says my curriculum. Monday was President’s Day, which prompts the annual flurry of lessons about “Famous Americans.” In Kindergarten, that means a birds-eye view. One day for George Washington, and the next day for Abraham Lincoln. For reasons I won’t get into here, I taught these lessons “flying blind,” because this class is not actually my class. I didn’t plan them myself, nor did I have time to really preview them before jumping right in with kids, live on Zoom. But offering excuses distracts from the point of this post, which is to call myself out for perpetuating white supremacy in my teaching. It happened so effortlessly. I simply followed the curriculum, repeated what I remembered being told, packaged it up with simple wording for little minds to grasp, and moved right along.
A face already familiar to anyone who's used U.S. dollars. Public domain.
We covered the traditional highlights: held up one finger to show he was the first president, found him on dollar bills and quarters, and looked at pictures of the “big pencil” monument in Washington, D.C. Our book shared a “fun fact” that he cared about dental hygiene. He had wooden teeth and hired people to brush his horse’s teeth, too, it claimed. The book also included the story about his honesty after chopping down the cherry tree. That part, at least, was acknowledged as possibly untrue.
“The Big Pencil.” Public domain.
The kids felt a personal connection with George Washington. They have seen his face on money. They live right around the corner from “his city,” Washington, D.C. Also, they learned that he was born in Virginia — where they live! One boy could even be overheard excitedly telling his mom he wanted to visit Mount Vernon, (I remember feeling similarly honored when I learned that Abraham Lincoln was from Illinois, just like me.)
It wasn’t until the next day, when Lincoln got similar treatment in the lesson plan, that I realized how much I’d left out in my teaching about Washington. You can’t teach about Lincoln without touching on slavery, even in the simplified cartoon version. As I read aloud about how Abraham Lincoln said all the slaves would be free, the thought occurred to me that this narrative — the one I heard in school as well — robs Black people of their agency in freeing themselves. So I improvised: “Abraham Lincoln, with a lot of help from other people.” I still felt bothered that this book gave Lincoln all the credit, as the prevailing narrative also tends to do.
Mount Vernon, Washington's home and slave plantation, and the subject of my students' coloring page. Photo credit: Ad Meskens via Wikimedia Commons.
Yet my thoughts kept returning to the previous day’s coloring page — George Washington, standing in front of Mount Vernon. Enslaved people built that stately home. Yet the students, some of them Black themselves, colored it in not knowing that, constructing an idea of George as an honorable man. I lied to them, leaving out the human trafficking and forced labor that Black people suffered at Washington’s hands. This man owned people. I lied to them.
I didn’t do it on purpose, but it was frighteningly easy. The sinister side to the George Washington story didn’t even cross my mind that day. Why was it easier to lie than tell the truth? Do I even know the whole truth? Was it made easier by the very fact of repeating the lies that I was once told?
Coming soon in Part 2: How should we teach Kindergarteners about George Washington?
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