By snoadmin
Willow Elementary School suffered an awkward encounter with racism Jan. 13. The highly controversial exercises began as a lesson in equality to honor the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr., but quickly escalated into a politically incorrect mess. A Willow Elementary School physical education teacher began the lesson by separating the 7- and 8-year-olds according to race, and then insisted that the minority children run laps while the white students played freely. The students running laps were also denied water during the demonstration.
She meant to send the class back to the 1960s – we suppose – to show how much the country has changed in regards to racial intolerance. Instead she confused the children and outraged their parents. When as ugly and controversial a topic as racism is taught in elementary school, the message risks being lost in translation.
According to SchoolFamily.com, a website dedicated to “helping parents help their children succeed,” once a child enters the second grade, he or she is “more likely to become choosy about friends”. Students are also “more easily influenced by friends and others outside their family,” it says. So in Willow Elementary School’s defense, they were just trying to beat them to the punch and serve as a foremost source in learning about tolerance.
In the parents’ defense, however, the children were simply too young to comprehend it.
The following Monday, Willow Elementary Principal, Bryan Shaw, sent out a letter of explanation to the school’s parents.
He wrote that “the lesson was intended to address the inequities of assigning privileges and obligations based upon the color of a person’s skin,” and that regrettably, it seemed to convey a different message to the participants and their families.
In elementary school, teachers act in a double occupancy, both as instructor and secondary moral compass. Their job is not only to introduce arithmetic but also social discipline. And half of teaching discipline is explaining why an action is worthy of punishment. An 8-year-old needs to be taught why pinching a classmate is inappropriate. They need to be told that it hurts their friend and that they did nothing to deserve it.
Likewise, if the perils of racism are to be taught in school, the injustice should be explained, not simulated. You wouldn’t pinch the 8-year-old offender in hopes to make him or her understand.
King preached equality and celebrated any evidence of its success. He was a strong believer in progress and though we are not all the way there, the change we have made as a society thus far is something to be proud of.
How might a white child who knows little of the complexity behind the history of segregation feel seeing their friends suffer for a reason that has yet to even cross their mind? At the risk of sending mixed messages, why introduce the question of race at all – especially to a group of kids who aren’t old enough to explore it properly?
A less controversial alteration of the same lesson plan (that would result in a similar conclusion) might be to assign items of various colors at random and separate the children according to those distinctions. Afterward, the students could return their beads and likewise their ties to the past. As an outside perspective, the children would be more confident in objecting to the indecencies they learn about.
The exercises at Willow Elementary School left children questioning whether the color of their skin matters. The fact that it probably never even crossed their minds prior to the demonstration is a concept worthy of celebration.
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