Martin Luther King
Mon., January 21, 09:38 AM
Today is Martin Luther King Day. My dream, my hope, is that we can teach our children his dream before they learn the prejudices of adults. We must judge people by their character, not by their color or religion or whatever makes them different from us. We may not be able to undo what we learned at kids, but we don’t have to pass it on.
An unusual example of what I mean turned up on yesterday’s “Sunday Morning,” in a feature about the deaf. The mother of two deaf children, deaf herself as well, has chosen not to educate her children at special schools. Despite the problems she had growing up in a world where only she could not hear, she says of schools for the deaf, “They can do fine for twelve years of school. They can go through four years of college. But then, how do they communicate with their boss?”
She’s absolutely right, of course. The greatest disservice we can do our children is to leave them unprepared for the world in which they will live. To those who go to private schools, religious or social, the shock of discovering at eighteen that the majority is different from them, is almost too much to bear. It never occurs to them what they say or do may be totally inappropriate.
[For example, look at the Yale Four, a group of Orthodox Jews who sued Yale University because they had to share a dormitory with women. This is an extreme, of course; they had been so completely sheltered throughout their schooling that they didn’t know that was the norm.]
On the other hand, consider the following, which I saw in a comic strip: the nursery school teacher tells the children that she is dividing the class into four groups – red, yellow, blue, and green. She then proceeds to hand out strips of colored paper in a random manner, and then the children compare their papers to find out which group they’re in.
“What group are you?” a little girl asks her friend. “Blue,” he replies. “Me too,” she says, “I’m so glad we’re the same color.” She doesn’t notice that her skin is pink and his is brown. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if none of us noticed?
It’s not just the United States, either. I saw a boy on the news saying, “they are our enemies; we have to kill them.” He was in modern dress. I don’t know whether he was Israeli or Palestinian. Can you distinguish which part of Ireland someone comes from by the way he looks? If a woman is not wearing Moslem dress, can you tell whether she’s Bosnian or Serb?
My dream is that we teach our kids to reason and to think, before they learn to pre-judge.
