The article has some analysis:

“At the time, high school history classes typically ignored the incongruity that Washington and others among the nation’s founders subscribed to the declaration that ‘all men are created equal’ and yet owned other human beings as chattel,” Robert W. Cherny writes in “Victor Arnautoff and the Politics of Art.”

In other words, Arnautoff’s purpose was to unsettle the viewer, to provoke young people into looking at American history from a different, darker perspective. Over the past months, art historians, New Deal scholars and even a group called the Congress of Russian Americans have tried to make exactly that point.

I mean, gosh, the horror of young people confronting history.

The vanishingly few students who might actually have taken the time to confront the images, and come away somewhat disturbed by them, are the very ones most benefiting from it.

Ah yes. That makes perfect sense.

I think there's a lot of public art in America that seems to lionise slave owners but I posted too soon.

Why not? I'm of the belief we shouldn't be afraid of our very dark history as a species - otherwise we can't learn from it. A high school is a place of learning first and foremost. Kids should be taught to never forget these things, or they'll eventually slip out of cultural memory all together.

It was painted to denounce the hypocrisy of the founding fathers. So, to me, it’s appropriate as it encourages critical thinking.

Why is this inappropriate. It's history that people should know and recogonise them for the horrors that they were.

Edit: maxerickson's reply is much better.

It's activist art depicting a scene of a non-historical event. While I get what the mural is trying to say, I don't necessarily think that this is something that kids should have to see every day when they're not in the context of a history class.

Think about it; how would you feel going to work every day if your office had murals of holocaust victims being sent into gas chambers? There's as valid a lesson to be learned from such a mural, but it's unnecessarily disturbing because it's out of context.

So no, the actual motive of San Francisco officials aside, I don't think it's appropriate for a high school mural.

It might be the only way the kids learn about the actual history of America vs what the Texas school book committee wants them to learn?