If you’ve had the misfortune of sitting through workplace “diversity training” sessions, you know how eye-rollingly pointless they can be.
The diversity training idea stems from a former teacher named Jane Elliott, who required her all-white class to participate in role-playing exercises. Groups were separated by eye color. The first day, the blues were treated well, and the browns were treated badly. The next day, the treatment was reversed. The point was for whites to be on the receiving end of ill-treatment and empathize with blacks.
Elliott went on to lead diversity sessions at corporations, conducting similar role-playing exercises, commanding a fee of $6,000.
Diversity so-called training in the corporate sphere is one thing. Adults are better equipped to know whether they’re being subjected to misguided guilt and indoctrination. Children, with their easily malleable minds, are less equipped.
I recently read about teachers in government schools conducting segregation experiments on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Apparently, these teachers (or more likely, higher-ups) believe requiring students to treat one another badly based on eye color is an appropriate way to teach them about America’s history of government-mandated racial segregation.
Putting children through emotional pain is a valid teaching method? Do schools typically teach through role-playing? Not only do white children in 2010 bear no responsibility whatsoever for government-mandated racial segregation, black children in 2010 are not recipients of it. What do bureaucrats hope to accomplish by separating students based on differences? Invoking children to anger and frustration generates resentment, not understanding.
The more important lesson about America’s history of racial segregation is that men like King appealed to the better part of people’s nature to carry out the promise of America’s founding and bestow the same rights to blacks that everyone else possessed. Americans of different races sacrificed and risked life and limb so that blacks could gain the privilege of being treated as free and responsible individuals equal before the law. If schools instill this idea into those malleable minds, instead of subjecting them to inane role-playing exercises designed to “teach” them how nasty people can be to each other, children might learn an enduringly valuable and more profound lesson.
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