I am a Social Studies teacher in a High School within the New Haven Public School District who teaches sociology, psychology, and current events for grades 9-12. My school has a population of over 1100 students, the majority of whom are African American or Hispanic and live within the local urban environment. My school also has a substantial percentage of students who are first generation English language learners and whose families have immigrated here from across the world. Consequently, these factors have informed my critical approach to addressing different topics within the classroom and maintaining a systemic focus on structural exploitation and inequality, since those factors must be recognized and opposed if students are to honestly reckon with the collective weight of our history.
One of the darker elements of human history that is often either ignored or dramatized is the deep-seated legacy of eugenics. Although this can be a disturbing topic to discuss, it remains increasingly vital to provide students with the necessary framework for understanding how such an abusive and grotesque hierarchy of human value came into being. Even more distressingly, eugenics still remains actively practiced to this day in nearly every facet of our society. From the way in which our schools rank and sort students according to their perceived academic ability to the inherently ableist nature of the job market itself, eugenicist logic permeates many of the most mundane and vital aspects of our lives.
This unit will uses a framework of critical analysis to explore how modern eugenics came into being through examining its historical context. While these assignments are made with a Sociology class in mind, they can still be applied in other courses, including history, civics and…. Once the different social elements that constitute eugenics have been identified in history, students will then analyze how eugenics advocates spread and operated across the US during the 1800s-1900s. Afterwards, students will begin drawing connections between those older practices and many of the policies and norms that still exist today in addition to learning from the efforts of different Critical theorists and activists today to abolish eugenics altogether.
It is my hope that this unit can provide students with some of the tools necessary to adequately grapple with different systems of oppression as they exist and to challenge the idea that injustice is natural or inevitable under whatever circumstances it arises within or is practiced under.
As critical pedagogy theorist Henry Giroux said, “Education, in the final analysis, is really about the production of agency. What kind of narratives are we going to produce that students can understand, that enlarge their perspective not only on the world but on their relationship to others and themselves?”1
