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To: Chancellor Palpatine
How dare them expose the fact that blacks were previously denied the right to vote and the legal ability to participate in the economy of their local communities, all before the adults in the lives of those first graders can indoctrinate them as to the innate inferiority of blacks. The shock! The gall! The horror!
First, most white childrens' impressions of blacks come from interacting with black children--not all of whom, unfortunately, are at any one time candidates for sainthood any more than white kids are. And of those which are distinctly not candidates for sainthood, most have had racist inculcation before ever they set foot in school. Any effective racist indoctrination to which a child, white or black, might be subject is pretty likely to occur before school, rather than after first grade. "Education" is not a magic bullet for eliminating racisim.

Secondly, a first-grader is not going to have any context to digest the information about racism; that information standing alone is a half-truth. It is a half-truth because not only didn't enslaved blacks have full standing as voting citizens before 1860, not only didn't women have the vote until about 1920, but nearly all the ancestors of nearly all Americans, however white and male they were, had no voice in government. The truth of America is not the hole in the donut, it is the donut itself--the fact that equality before the law is vastly improved over the past. And that equality before the law had to be invented here.

The big picture of American freedom is glorious, and what we now see as the dark portions of the past merely illustrate how easy it was for things to be worse than they now are.

The big picture of American prosperity is glorious; if you are at the "poverty line" now you're more prosperous than my middle-class family was in 1950. In fact that prosperity compares with what the salary of the president of the United States would have bought two centuries ago.

To teach first graders to take the big picture for granted and focus only on the negative is manipulative. In fact, it is exactly what a journalist does, and you cannot learn history from a newspaper. Time enough to learn the details and caveats of history after you have some concept of the big picture.


65 posted on 08/30/2003 10:24:47 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The everyday blessings of God are great--they just don't make "good copy.")
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion
"you are at the "poverty line" now you're more prosperous than my middle-class family"

Ain't that da truth!

My wife & I were figuring out our finances the other day (I'm disabled now and get SS & some disability insurance I paid for) when we realized that ACCORDING TO the feds and other useless people - WE ARE POOR!

We MUST be starving! (we're eligible for food stamps) but we ARE (my wife will kill me) a bit overweight

We MUST be destitute! We drive a nice 1998 Blazer with 60k miles and do have a spare car

WE MUST need housing assistance! I OWN 2 houses (almost paid off)

We MUST need assistance! I volunteer 60-80 hours/week to UNPAID public service web sites.

Yeah - the American "POOR" are richer than the upper class in MOST other countries in the world! Where else can the "POOR" run around in the new caddy's, new clothes, gabbing on the cell phones 20 hrs /day while eating their Big Macs?

Yeah - we are really a destitute and EVIL country.

How can I afford all this? Easy! My kids grew up, moved out, and take care of themselves and their own families!
72 posted on 08/30/2003 10:47:43 AM PDT by steplock (www.FOCUS.GOHOTSPRINGS.com)
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