When will we ever learn?

When Will We Ever Learn?

 

This past weekend major religious groups in our country celebrated the triumph people over hatred and bigotry.   These events happened thousands of years ago.  But they should be not just be celebrated once a year as historical events.  It doesn’t take much investigation to realize we are still fighting the same fights in different terms that were fought so very long ago.  Those triumphs that were celebrated were not victories because our society continues to be victimized by ignorance and bigotry.

We never want slavery to happen again.  We do not want another holocaust. Certainly, we never want to imprison innocent citizens as we did to our Japanese-Americans during WWII.  Yet crimes against Jews have tripled in New York this year over last year; they have doubled over African-American people in the same time period.  The white supremist Charlottesville demonstrators that chanted “ Jews will not replace us” and was supported by Klansmen gave a strong indication of how much more we need to do.   People were injured and killed, but our President at the time said, “there were good people on both sides”. 

The Governor of Florida is banning books that he believes are teaching Critical Race Theory even though there is no such curriculum, but he has even found evidence in math books. He probably saw the chapter on binomial equations and misunderstood what it meant.  Over and over we know that if we do not know about historical events we are condemned to repeat them.

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.  In essence, NATO nations did very little.  Now they are doing much more, but because of the past response there is much more that now needs to be done.

Hatred and bigotry, unfortunately will always be with us.  Bigotry is rooted in the fear and insecurity of the bigot.  We need to teach our children our true history.  The more each of our children sees for him or herself in the torment of others, the less likely they are to participate in that torment. The very first step to getting better at anything is to define the problem.  If we deny one exists or pretend it never happened, we cannot repair the world.  We should not be fomenting racial animus for political gain. The cost to all of us is too dear.  Educators need to be able to help our children be unafraid to look at that history and answer the question, what can I do to make my future devoid of these kinds of events. This is not a job for politicians.  They need to get out of the way of professional educators. If not now, when?   If not we, who?