How Not to Teach about Martin Luther King, Jr.

There's this lesson that some teachers like to teach this time of year to help kids understand the deep and pervasive effects of segregation and discrimination in the Jim Crow South. Here's how it works: you divide your class of little people into seemingly random groups, and one group gets to be the "privileged" group, and the other gets to be the underclass, without choices or privileges. The intended result is that all children walk away with a better sense of what segregation meant, and how wrong it was.

First let me make this point. Teachers, STOP USING THIS LESSON PLAN. Just stop. No excuses, no justifications - just stop. Never teach it again. The end.

Children have a great capacity to understand compassion, courage, generosity, mercy, and justice. Elementary school children do not have the developmental capacity to take on a position of power or disempowerment, and then transfer that lesson to an understanding of how it hard it was to live as a minority in Mississippi in the first part of the 20th century. They are just barely beginning to understand the concept of fair and unfair in the small context of their own lives - they do not have the life experience to transfer the feeling of being unfairly discriminated against to one of the most important social movements of the last century. I've read about this social experiment from the point of view of many adult people of color, including adoptees, and their experience was largely one of being singled-out, confused, belittled, and humiliated. For many of them, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day came to be the day they were blatantly reminded them that they were different from, and often less than, their peers.

On Friday, my child came home broken-hearted, shoulders slumped over, usual run was slowed to a walk. The teacher, who has otherwise been a great help this year, had divided their class up and put all the "dark-haired kids" in one group (conveniently including all of the minority children), and this group had to sit at their desks and "do nothing" during reading time, and the blonde-haired kids got to move around the room and do whatever they wanted.

The lesson was lost. My child teared up, telling me how the teacher smirked and said, "I bet you guys feel really bad right now," and how the Lakota girl in the class cried and cried.

I think I get where the teacher was coming from, although it smacks of unexamined privilege. She was trying to get the kids to understand why the Civil Rights Movement needed to happen, and what it might feel like to be on the side of the Freedom Riders. The problem is that she singled out all the kids who ALREADY know what that feels like because it reflects their current reality, and the unintended message that was once again reinforced for the entire class was that it is, indeed, better to be blond and white, instead of dark-haired and brown.

I am waiting to hear back from the teacher before I decide whether or not this issue needs to be taken higher up in the school and the district. I'm also looking for alternative curriculum materials, so I can come to the table with something other than fightin' words (I've got plenty of those, too.) I'm hoping for a good resolution in the end, and a better experience for future classes.

I am also hoping that taking my concerns to a public forum does not blow up in my face. That said, the fact that I have heard of this exact scenario happening over, and over, and over again makes me think that being silent is not the best course of action. As a parent with a professional background in education and child development, I believe that classrooms should be safe places for children to learn, explore, and express themselves, where all children feel valued and heard. This exercise flies in the face of that core belief.

I sat down with my child, and we listened to the entire seventeen minutes of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. My child wisely said to me, "Martin Luther King would not have like that lesson." My child understood that his real message was one of equality, love, justice, fairness - not about subjecting another generation of children to the experience of exclusion and injustice. So did my child's (fair-haired, white) best friend, who quietly refused to participate in the activity, as a sign of solidarity, and then stood in front of the whole class and expressed his own discomfort with the unfairness of it all.

As the great man said himself, "We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity."

If you haven't watched the whole speech in awhile, I encourage you to honor one of the greatest leaders of our modern time by sitting down with your family, and doing that. Reflect on the fact that, while we certainly have come quite a long way since 1963, we still have so very far to go.