In case you missed it, rush over and take a look at Joanne Jacobs’ discussion of segregation in a Las Vegas school — not “real” segregation, but segregation as a teaching method. Many of the comments to her post are interesting as well.
An article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal outlined the “outlandish technique” librarian Lora Mazzulla used to teach third graders about segregation, “which involved separating children by skin color and giving preferential treatment to black students.”
“All the African-American children were given board games to play, and everyone else had to put their heads at the table, and they weren’t to look up or speak,” said Stacey Gough, whose daughter Amber is a third-grader at Manch. “She told them that she believes in everything that Martin Luther King (Jr.) had to say and she wanted the white children to know what it was like to be black back then.”
Some of the children were upset, as were their parents and school administrators.
I’m not quite sure what to make of Ms. Mazzulla’s attempt to teach about the evils of segregation (and of racial preferences as well?) by exposing some students to a small dose of them.
Neither, apparently, does Gary Orfield, director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard.
Gary Orfield, professor of education and social policy at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass., said classroom simulations and role-playing are common and powerfully effective teaching methods.
But during his years studying race issues in U.S. schools, he was unfamiliar with any other instance in which teachers employed Mazzulla’s method of separating children by race to teach about racial segregation.
“Usually, they take the blue-eyed kids and treat them differently from the brown-eyed kids,” said Orfield, director of the Harvard Project on School Desegregation and co-director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project.
Orfield said teachers in the United States generally try to ignore race because they are not adequately trained in how to approach what remains an explosive issue some four decades after the heights of the civil rights era.
“With all the emphasis on math and reading tests, we skim over training our teachers on how to teach important parts of our society, such as race,” Orfield said. “Everything about race is so supersensitive, so you really have to frame this type of instruction the right way, and teachers generally aren’t prepared.”
In other words, it’s a good idea to teach kids about racial segregation by separating them based on eye color but not based on race? Exactly who is trying to “ignore race” here?
Actually, I think I might be more concerned about this exercise being done by an Orfield-approved “right way” teacher than by Ms. Mazzulla, since Orfield and his center have never seen a busing plan or racial preference of which they disapproved.
(Thanks to the Curmudgeonly Clerk for encouraging me to take a look at the article.)
There has got to be a better way to teach kids about the past. I remember when my daughter was in 3rd grade in North Carolina, all the emphasis on MLK and Black History Month had her coming home in tears after being called a “white cracker” and being accused of (her ancestors) keeping slaves. And now, here we are in Hawaii, where she gets to hear once again about the evil white man and what he has done to destroy and discriminate over the years.
If a teacher had ever pulled a stunt like that (the one in the post), I would have certainly had something to say about it.
Teaching Segregation
How do we teach kids what discrimination feels like, unless we actually discriminate against them?
Making it Worse
Discriminations: Segregation As A Teaching Method Archives If part of the goal of the civil rights movement is a color-blind America, why must we do everything we can to keep reminding our children that there are differences worth noting between…
“‘With all the emphasis on math and reading tests, we skim over training our teachers on how to teach important parts of our society, such as race,’ Orfield said. ‘Everything about race is so supersensitive, so you really have to frame this type of instruction the right way, and teachers generally aren’t prepared.'”
Then why can’t they just skip over it. Really. Why do teachers have to address the subject of race at all, especially in elementary school? Is it because they just know that all parents are unregenerate bigots and they have to indoctrinate the kids into correct ways of thinking?
Actually, Laura, I think you have it backwards.
They think parents are generally pretty mellow on the subject of race.
Which leaves the experts unemployed.
Bigotry cannot be allowed to die.
i think that it is a good way to teach the youth, but it may have been too young to teach it to them in that manner.
i’m glad to see that some people are not liking that type of treatment allowed on their kids, but too bad more didnt think that way when it happened only decades ago.
we are in a new age, but discrimination still exists and we need to expose it, as well as bigotry. teaching against the foolishness of former practices of our country’s people is a good thing. maybe wait til they are in junior high though to allow them to develop more understanding.
otherwise i support the idea, just maybe not the age it was shown to.
Making it Worse
Discriminations: Segregation As A Teaching Method Archives If part of the goal of the civil rights movement is a color-blind America, why must we do everything we can to keep reminding our children that there are differences worth noting between the ra…
Can someone please tell me where I can find the original documentary of the “blue-eyed/brown-eyed students” experiment by this teacher?I’ve seen it on PBS a few years ago and I cannot find it, as I don’t know the title nor the name of the teacher. Is it Mazzulla?