NOVI, Mich. – Students in a Detroit-area school were recently asked a bizarre question: Would they rather be a slave or a factory worker during the Industrial Revolution?

The question was part of an essay assignment given to eighth-graders during their American History class at Novi Middle School. The unnamed teacher who assigned the question was trying to get students to think critically about how the lives of free blacks differed from the lives of free whites and enslaved people, according to CBS Detroit.

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One African-American mom, Tina James, says the essay question was wildly offensive.

“The first thing I thought was, ‘How can you even compare the two?’” James told CBS Detroit. “As far as I’m concerned, they are diametrically opposing circumstances. You have on one end, a slave that is not free, who has no free will. And on the other end, you have a factory worker – and although it was in the Industrial Revolution – they still had a free choice … to walk away if they wanted to.”

James’ grew even more disgusted when her 13-year-old daughter told her “the majority of the class” said they would choose to be a slave instead of a factory worker in the days of long work weeks and low wages.

“She was just extremely confused by that, knowing what slaves went through, she couldn’t understand why anyone would choose that,” James said. “The rationale by those students to choose slaves was that they had free housing, they had free food and they had free protection. But the argument that she and I put forth was that those things were not free.”

According to Movoto.com, 64 percent of the school’s student population is white, 8 percent is African-American.

“When we’re educating students, we need to make sure that we’re educating all the students and not just the majority. We need to understand how the minority feels,” James said.

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Novi Community schools Superintendent Steve Matthews agreed that the essay question diminished “the horrific effects of slavery,” and he instructed the teacher to retire the question from service.

“It clearly is a question that I don’t think helps students understand the depths of the suffering that the slaves endured back in the 1800′s,” Matthews told the CBS Detroit. “So, I decided that we needed to pull that question and try to approach that content expectation in another way.”

Matthews continued:

“This can certainly be a learning situation, both for the teachers and for the students. I think that we need to reevaluate potentially how we teach slavery. You know, do we truly communicate the horrific nature of that institution and the harm it caused to many hundreds of thousands of lives? And if we’re not doing a good job of communicating that message, then this is an opportunity for us to review that and to make sure that we do communicate clearly why that was such a horrible, horrific institution.”

That sounds like a good plan to us. The only thing we’d add is that Ms. James is an impressive and articulate lady who might want to consider becoming a teacher herself.