San Francisco school leaders are teaching students about censorship in the worst way possible. The school board wants to eradicate a decades-old mural depicting slaves and a dead Native American. White paint will erase the troubling images of this country’s bloody past, it seems.

The board vote is the polite side of censorship. The artwork is meant to illustrate the life of President George Washington in its sober entirety. It includes the harsh side to a sainted figure in ways that are graphic and uncomfortable. The nation’s first president was a slave owner and fought Native American tribes in the colonial-era army. That history is disturbing, and so is the sprawling fresco.

The board members are choosing the easy way out by siding with literal-minded critics who say the 1,600-square-foot mural shows minority groups only as victims and glorifies violence. That criticism is shallow. It misses the essential point of the 1930s-era communist artist who deliberately painted a blunter appraisal of founding father Washington. For 84 years, students at George Washington High School have gotten a reminder of their school’s namesake every day. That history lesson should, if anything, please the very groups that are targeting the design.

The board voted to cover the mural with a coat of paint or a set of panels. It won’t be cheap, with the cost ranging from $600,000 to $825,000 due to anticipated legal bills on top of an environmental impact report required when a historic resource is at issue. A Washington High alumni group is mulling a lawsuit to block the removal. Maybe this convoluted path can make for a high school course on the inanity of the board’s action.

San Francisco students should not be shielded from reminders of this country’s conflicted past. The mural deserves to stay as a graphic history lesson. Instead, it may vanish because timid board members found it easier to be censors than serious educators. They deserve a flunking grade.

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