Reply to Petition to Change Names of Stuart and Lee HS

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Reply to "Petition to Change Names of Stuart and Lee HS"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
+1000  This is the best post on here.  I taught at Lee High School.  It is now a hugely immigrant school.  It is very welcoming of all minorities. What matters is the environment of the school and that is what affects the students.  And it is a decent school with caring teachers and many programs.  The name Lee is way down the list of things that matter to the students there.  I don't think people should be foaming at the mouth over this stuff.  We have much more important things to discuss.  And I am no fan of the "Old South".  I am a Northerner who transplanted here.  I do think Robert E. Lee qualifies as a person who was not completely evil.  At the very least he can be recognized as a brilliant military strategist who graduated first in his class at West Point.  Lincoln admired him and had asked him to be his general.  Yes, there was slavery, but this is all a part of history and history is messy.  Maybe there is a message in all of that for all of us.  Nobody at Lee HS is whitewashing the history of Lee.  There is no intimidation or scariness at Lee HS that is resulting from the name of the school.    [/quote]

Numerous Lee graduates and former teachers have signed the petition and noted their shame and embarrassment about attending and teaching at a school in NoVa named after a Confederate general.  The school wasn't named after Lee because of his success at West Point,  orr Lincoln's esteem for him, and you know that.  It was named for him because he had led an armed war against the United States, at a time (1958) when Virginia was resisting the Supreme Court's mandates to integrate the public schools.  It's a shameful legacy that many people are more than willing simply to overlook, but there is significant social research suggesting that forcing minority students to attend schools named to honor Confederate heroes has a negative impact.  [/quote]

I'd like to see that research. Anyway, it's not 1958 now.

It's not really my business, since my kids do not go to Lee. If the administration and students there now want to change the name, then they can do so, as far as I'm concerned. The impulse doesn't make sense to me, but it's not my decision to make.[/quote]

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