Debate
Is School the Best Place to Teach Tolerance?

YES
Bettie Sing Luke, a multicultural trainer for the Eugene, Oregon, schools, works with teachers to help students develop tolerance and appreciation for each other's cultures. She has also worked in Seattle and, since 1973, has conducted diversity training in 30 states. E-mail: luke@4j.lane.edu.

A resounding yes! on teaching tolerance in school! School is the only common institution where all students can be touched and prepared to survive in our society's marvelous and sometimes maddeningly diverse mix.

We are less connected, as a society, than we were when travel and technology opportunities were more limited. Witness the recent instances of school violence, situations that cried out for tolerance.

Schools, I believe, can help redefine "family" and "belonging" and reinforce respect. They have to. It's unrealistic to depend on tolerance being taught at home.

Have you checked the percentages on single-parent and two-job families? Busy parents may have good ideals to pass on to their children, but we are no longer a society of "Dick and Jane" families sitting down for dinner and quality conversation each night.

Nor are all families models of tolerance. Some young people will reject the intolerant attitudes they might see at home, but what about children who are afraid to think beyond what they are told at home?

What if children never hear alternatives to intolerance at home--especially mainstream students, who can go through their entire lives and never be asked to reconsider their positions of privilege.

Religious or spiritual communities are a natural conduit for teaching tolerance, but in some localities there may be no religious leadership or opportunity to practice.

Cultural beliefs about education can come into play as well.

In my culture, teachers have a highly elevated status. They are entrusted with children because their knowledge and wisdom are believed superior to those of parents.

Chinese heritage is imbued with the Confucian ethics of hierarchy. Parents do not sit and chit chat with their children--this just is not done in traditional families!

I observed, as a child, that my parents had to submit to bias and unfair treatment. If they didn't, they risked further harm to others who looked like us. Had I not had lessons from school, I might have acquiesced to the same fate.

Given these dynamics, schools are the prime choice for imparting tolerance. Dedicated teaching can overcome negative attitudes.

When I worked for the Seattle Public Schools, a rumble between Black and Asian students erupted in a middle school woodworking class. The conflict escalated and spilled out into the community.

I chose a black male as an intervention partner and, together, we quelled the fears on both sides, letting the students know the school had adult advocates of their cultural group working on their behalf.

Young men of both groups were greeting each other in the halls within three weeks.

Schools can teach all children about tolerance and connectedness--through anti-bias programs and through individual commitment to tolerance, across the board, woven through all subjects.

Students, in turn, can then impact family and outside influences that may not be as tolerant.

Voting Results | Forum

NO
Barbara Joan Grubman is a speech specialist for the Los Angeles Unified School District at Grant High School in Van Nuys, California. She began teaching in New Jersey when Eisenhower was president and her salary was under $3,000. E-mail: bgrubman@lausd.k12.ca.us.

It is how your father treats the neighbors. It is how your mother welcomes the world into your childhood home.

It is the words they use to talk about others--the words that help or heal, that allow you as a child to develop a sense of tolerance.

Long before a child's historic first day of school, the home provides a foundation of values. Those early years are made up of precious opportunities for teaching children acceptance of others.

I believe children cannot learn this lesson in school. They have to see tolerance modeled by those nearest and dearest to them. They have to hear the words and read the body language of those who care for them and nurture them from infancy.

Toddlers are sensitive to our every look. They know that "funny" glance, the hidden disdain, the lowered eyes of parents that say "this person is different." Spend a few minutes with a young child, and you'll know they don't miss much. Babies take in attitudes with mother's milk.

My maternal grandmother, Rose, was a frightened and prejudiced woman. I grew up as a lower middle-class kid in the East Bronx, New York. My father's mother, a loving and tolerant woman, also lived nearby. But my mother's mother lived right across the street from us and it was there that I went home for lunch and after school.

I can look back now with the perspective of time and see her fears, but then all I knew was that there were a lot of people out there she did not like, who did not "measure up" to what we were. From her, I learned that blacks were not to be trusted, German Jews were the chosen ones, and many people had what she termed "shifty eyes."

Even as I sat at her oil cloth-covered kitchen table, as she prepared dinner, I knew that those people could not all be bad. Hating the way she treated her foreign-born husband--my beloved grandfather--and hearing her unkind words directed toward my unconventional father, I silently vowed never to be like her. I felt as if I needed to protect them from her barbs. So, ironically, I learned from a very intolerant woman what it meant to be tolerant.

How do we teach our children that those who are different should not be feared--that the kid next to them holds the same fears, loves, emotions as they do?

You have to open your ears to the words of an Orthodox Jewish grandmother who you see has an open heart and a hand for all who come in her path. You have to start to discern from another grandmother, that the way she looks at others is not the way you wish to, even when you are too young to put a name to it.

If we wait until we send our children off that first day of school, proud in their shiny new clothes, it is too late. The window of opportunity for teaching tolerance, while it may not be shut and locked, is already lowered.

Being exposed to the lesson of tolerance at school is better than not hearing it at all, but without the foundations laid by family, educators face an uphill battle.

A lesson at school can reinforce what a child already feels, but home is where the heart is.