The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth

A commentary on Georgia House Bill 1084

Photo by Gavin Chen, Photography Editor

This article is satire; none of the contents are to be taken at face value or seriously. This article does not reflect the true opinions of the author. 

Ria Dubey, Opinions Editor

To those of you that don’t like social studies, I have good news for you! Georgia’s Board of Education’s new favorite bill, H.B.1084, will render all your troubles obsolete. It bans all discussion of race and racism in classrooms. No longer will you ever have to learn about the thousands of years of slavery and oppression people have faced worldwide. No longer will you have to feel bad for things that don’t even affect you anymore. After all, racism is a thing of the past now—isn’t it? All that business with the police was surely just people being overdramatic snowflakes.

Now, you will only learn the truth in classes. No more biased perspectives from your well-educated history teachers—only the absolute facts from your perfectly written and chosen history textbooks. No more uncomfortable topics because you will see the world only as it should be. Never mind that a few (only a few, mind you) things would have to be slightly—very slightly—embellished. It’s all for the benefit of the students.

I mean what could anyone possibly gain from knowing about the mistakes of their ancestors? It’s not like we need to learn from them; after all we are so much better and smarter than everyone in the past. They didn’t even have TikTok, so what could they possibly know?

This bill is an important step forward after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” Bill, which bans the discussion of different genders and sexualities in classes. While that bill was useful, we don’t even learn that much about the oppression LGBTQ+ people faced, so it didn’t really change the courses of our history classes all that much. All it did was stop teachers from representing the diverse backgrounds of students in their classroom curricula, which was hard enough before, so the bill didn’t really accomplish much in that aspect. It did, however, stop the annoying activists in class though, who keep claiming that LGBTQ+ people are people too. I mean, duh, if they weren’t, then how could we possibly oppress them?

Either way, the clear next step forward is to stop the spread of feminist propaganda. I really don’t want to learn anything more about the Seneca Falls Convention; our books don’t even mention anyone hot there. It’s awful. All we’ve done to get rid of all the women's problems in the curriculum is stigmatize conversations about women’s bodies and issues to the point that even adults are uncomfortable talking about basic things every woman faces. Still, there’s always that one overly smart, confident teacher that isn’t shy to talk about it and just has to educate everyone because it’s their “duty” or something. If you’re really unlucky. you might even get more than one of those kinds of teachers. Imagine the horror. No—what we really need to do is outlaw any conversations about women. That’s it. Just anything about women. It’ll be glorious.

So, on the agenda for shortening social studies curricula: nationalize bans on conversations regarding race, sexuality, and gender in classrooms. That way, all we will know is the comfortable, correct truth that every good, pure-bred American child should know, not the propaganda the communists try to push upon us, claiming we are bad people. We, the people of the U.S., home of the brave (but only if they’re being brave about what we believe in), land of the free (but only if it presents us in a good light), being the bad guys. Can you imagine?