David,

There is a time in life to explore the nitty and the gritty, but perhaps in 
elementary school we should still put a positive face on things.

One year, while I was at a primary school as the computer teacher, it was M 
L King day. A particular group of Kindergartners came in squabbling among 
themselves. Seems their teacher had given them some "reality" in the day's 
lesson, and the black children were complaining about the white children and 
the white children were complaining about the black children, all of them 
charging each other with dastardly deeds and denying dastardly deeds. So, I 
called the group to order, and asked them to tell me what the squabble was 
about, and they told me what they had learned that morning about a time when 
black and white children could not go to school together and ML King 
preached for change. Was the story true? they wanted to know. I told them 
that yes the story was true, that in some places in our country, black 
children and white children could not go to the same schools, but that our 
country had changed since that time. I told them to look around the table. 
They were crowded around a round table, and had formed themselves in an 
almost perfect black/white alternating pattern around the table. Then I 
asked them if they knew what Dream ML King had had. They knew that he wanted 
black and white children to go to school together. So I asked them if his 
dream had come true. And, with delight, they said it had.

They stopped squabbling and were ready to go to the computers in the lab, 
where again, they chose to sit black by white and white by black. And, for 
several weeks, as they came in the lab, that class noticed that they were 
integrated and that ML King's dream had come true.

For the rest of the years that I was in that position, on the day that the 
school celebrated ML King, I would ask the children to look around and tell 
me if that great man's dream had come true.

While I do not believe that young children should always be sheltered from 
the truth, I do believe they should be led, when possible, to see the 
positive outcomes in history. Let the children know that positive outcomes 
can happen when people work to make goodness overcome evil. And, always let 
the children talk out what they understand, what they have heard from 
elders, and then let them see that the sun has come out (if it hasn't shame 
on us!)

Anne



Anne Pemberton
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http://www.erols.com/apembert
http://www.educationalsynthesis.org