"One More River to Cross" Charles Lawrence

I'm not really certain about what Lawrence is arguing here. I think he's trying to say that while desegregation was a step, it was by no means the end to inequality that people who were anti segregation thought it would be.

From what I have gotten from this reading, Lawrence believes that just having black students learn in the same classrooms as white students do won't give them equal opportunities. More has to be done than just bringing students from different races together.

The problem of inequality, especially when it comes to in jobs and education, has a deep root. Segregation was just the stem of the problem. The root of it runs much deeper and it much harder to pin point.

“It is the thesis of this paper that the Brown decision fostered a way of thinking about segregation that has allowed both the judiciary and society at large to deny the reality of race in America, that the recognition of that reality is critical to the framing of any meaningful remedy-judicial or political-and that Brown may ultimately be labeled a success only insofar as we are able to make it stand for what it should have stood for in 1954.”

I think what Lawrence means by that is that desegregation made white people think that their responsibility to people of color was done with. Everyone was mixed together now, everything was “equal”, so racism must no longer exist. What Lawrence is saying, at least what I think he's saying, is that Brown Vs. Board might have done more harm than good because at the time it didn't stand for what it should have stood for. In other words, it was more about mixing races than it was about creating a real equality among them. This is a problem because now many people don't want to admit that there is still inequality. They think that just because society has been desegregated means that there is no longer barriers blocking students of color from getting the same quality of treatment, education, and then later on, jobs, that white students enjoy.

“The third is that the institution of segregation is organic and self-perpetuating. Once established it will not be eliminated by mere removal of public sanction but must be affirmatively destroyed.”

Here Lawrence shows that just by getting rid of segregation won't do the trick. The problem is that segregation labeled people of color as inferior. When the governement let black students attend an all white school, they weren't making the statement of “here are these black kids, they are now your equals!”

It was more along the lines of “They're here and there's nothing you can do about it so just tolerate them”.

That's definitely harmful because it teaches the idea of tolerance rather than believing that people are equal.

I really hate that word tolerance. Anyone else hate it too? I would hate to have someone say about me “Just tolerate her!”. How horrible, to be “tolerated” but not accepted. Not understood because people don't care to understand. Just tolerated because you're there and there's nothing that other people can do about it. I'd imagine that's how some of the first women in the armed forces must have felt. Hated but tolerated.

“The parent's immediate goal was largely fulfilled. The school was successful in engendering strong positive self-images among both children and parents, in creating an atmosphere in which children enjoyed learning, in expanding the school's role into a concern for the whole child and that child's family, and even in increasing scores on standardized tests. But there was little we could do to realize the parents' more long-range dreams. Even if we controlled the school we controlled little else. This became apparent as we began to talk about where our students would go when they left Highland Park. What were we preparing our children for? Would there be places for them to use what we were teaching them as fulfilled productive”

This part of the reading had confused me the first few times I read over it. At first I thought it had said that the students from the Highland Park school were all black, and that they did well because they were being taught by black teachers who they could look up and because they had access to the same materials that white kids had. But then I read it again and saw that this was a school that had white students in it too. And that the students did do better in school and had higher self esteem and test scores, but then parents were worried about what would become of them after school. Since the root of the problem runs much deeper than just a poor school system in city schools, but also prejudices when it comes to hiring people for jobs.


I'm still a little confused about this reading. I think I have the main idea of it, but I'm not positive. Right now I feel as if all I've written so far could be wrong. I think that talking about it in class will help me more.

Ahhh! The Ele Ed Admissions Portfolio Due Date Snuck Up On Me!

I don't know if anyone else is just realizing this as well, but the admissions portfolio for Ele Ed is due in 16 days!

Make sure you give your Supervisor Reference Form to your teachers if you're in the Eled Program soon. I almost forgot but I'm going to ask her to fill it our Friday so that she has a week to do so and I can get it from her on 4/3.

Is anyone else wondering about the career commitment essay? We get them back 4/10, but our portfolios are due on 4/9 the latest.

What the Hell are they doing with Dora?

Ok, well, I'm not a Dora fan. My little cousin is 5 and she really likes Dora, but I never really liked the show.

We talked about the gender roles in Dora and I don't like how the show does that. But this seems like a new step in the wrong direction.


Question: Are they trying to make Dora a sexual figure? They're going to be making a new Dora doll of Dora as a pre-teen, and it looks like the gender role image is still there. She's very girly with extra jewelery and all. Sure, she's fully dressed NOW, but hopefully she doesn't turn into a Bratz ripoff later on. She is going to sell well.






And look at this toy...



Maybe I just have my mind in the gutter but doesn't this look like an interesting shape for them to have chosen? The coloring too...




P.S.

I guess I'm not the only one who thought that toy was... interesting.

In The Service of What? The Politics of Service Learning

Ok... So, the main point that Kahne and Westheimer are making here is that as a society we're encouraging students to become involved with service learning, but we really don't have a clear goal on what kind of service learning we want to have students do.

As they explained, there are two different types of service learning. Charity and Change. I already knew this and have had to do a ton of service learning for different things. Some for school, some for church, and some for scholarships. I know the ropes.

And I like service learning. I really always have. For the most part my service learning has been in the hopes to change things, but I have also done something things that would be considered charity. I think that we need both of them.

All this seems so obvious to me that it's painful to write about now. I don't know why I'm having such a strong opposing attitude towards responding to this article. I guess I've just talked about it so many times before that it feels like someone giving me an assignment about healthy foods versus unhealthy foods. Just obvious things that feel silly to keep repeating because I know them all already.

Hey, I just thought of something though. Maybe an interesting analogy? I don't know, worth mentioning though.


Charity is sort of like junk food. It tastes good going down, you feel good for that minute or hour or day. But then you forget that you even ate that piece of cake or that bag of chips and you don't care about the last time that you did.



Change is like healthy food. It can be hard work to keep up with that good diet, but it's a long term good feeling. It's more work having to prepare a salad to bring for lunch than it is to grab a cheeseburger out of Donovan, but in 5 years, you're going to have made a difference (at least for your body).

Hmm, I think I like that analogy. Maybe it's flawed because the people you're serving aren't represented, but that's ok. Service learning isn't always about helping people anyways.


So we'll call Charity junk food, and we'll call change healthy food. We all need to grab junk food every now and then. Why? Well, because sometimes we really do just need a break from cutting up all those carrots for our salad. And other times we just need a quick fix of "Feel Good".

So we donate a dollar to a charity, or we go to volunteer at a soup kitchen for a night. We do this because we might not have time to do something that is going to change anything and we just want a quick fix of "I did something good today. Yay for me, I'm a good person".

Healthy food, a good diet, is doing something that's going to have a long term effect on the people (or things) you're helping.

Let's do a hypothetical situation. So, you help out at a school and teach kids how to plant trees and flowers and about the importance of preserving our environment. You do this for three years. In those three years you teach 300 students how to plant.

Then 100 of those students go on to plant trees and flowers in their community and inspire other people to help. They then teach those people how to plant trees and flowers and about preserving nature. Five years after you started teaching kids how to plant there are now 10 new gardens in your students communities and 70 trees planted.

If the cycle continues, that's change. It took three years of your life to get this movement started, but you managed to get other people motivated and now everyone's planting stuff all over the place and everything's looking beautiful. It's harder than just donating a buck to public parks, but it changed something.

"As Lawrence Cremin explains. these educators believed that. "by manipulating the school curriculum, they could ultimately change the world."

Change is also educational. Instead of just tossing a dollar in a jar that says "Help us plant trees! Donate today!" you're learning why we need to plant tress. What the benefits of gardens are in your community.

If school want students to do service learning, I think it should be because it's an education experience. Therefor, I think that service learning required for school should be focused on change.

Students have more free times than most adults do. They have opened minds, more so than many adults, and have energy. They can inspire other young people to help. They also have 13 years where they're stuck in school anyways, so why not have them spend the last 4 of those years working on changing something important?

"Students tutor. coach softball, paint playgrounds, and read to the elderly because they are interested in people, or because they want to learn a little about poverty and racism before they head out into the waiting corporate world .... We do not volunteer "to make a statement," or to use the people we work with to protest something." -William T. Grant

I think that statement is true to an extent. I do believe that some people do community service just because they want to present an image for themselves. I think it would be better to encourage change service learning rather than charity service learning because it makes the volunteer involved enough to give them a change to REALLY care. Charity seems to be easy for people to do quickly and without much passion, especially if it's required.

"If we focus on the "numerous values we share as a community," writes Amitai Etzioni, the founder of the cornmunitarian movement and a proponent of service learning, "our world would be radically improved. "32 While such rhetoric might allow this political scientist to be a trusted advisor to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, it will not resolve the dilemmas facing practitioners who need to think carefully about the many values that we do not share, about what a radically improved world might look like, and about the different ways one might pursue this goal."

I think this is a big issue when it comes to getting political support for volunteer work that promotes change! Some people are just not ready for these changes to happen. They're comfortable with certain people being oppressed, or certain life styles being better than others. Something like my planting trees example isn't a threat to the way that we live as people, but, something like promoting the hiring of women in high position jobs (both in business and politics) would add more competition for men who want those positions.

Unlearning the Myths That Bind Us

Linda Christensen talks about the deeper meanings and messages behind cartoons and how they influence children. Christensen wants us to analyze the cartoons that we see on tv and the movies that children watch to find the racism, sexism, and the attitudes towards rich and poor people. Christensen wants people to come to terms with the way they have been manipulated, even as children, to accept social norms and common stereotypes.

“When we read children's books, we aren't just reading cute little stories, we are discovering the tools with which a young society is manipulated.”

I thought this was a powerful statement. Especially because at first glance it sounds completely paranoid. Youths being manipulated by literature? But, reading is good, right? We're supposed to read Sleeping Beauty to kids before bed. Thinking of children's stories as anything more than entertainment seems silly to some people.

It's when you take a closer look at some of the things that we've seen or read as children when things become kind of scary.

Reading this article automatically reminded me of Sunflower the Centaur from Fantasia. The scene featuring Sunflower is now banned, and was first removed during the editing for the re-release in the late 60's.

This is the YouTube Link where the video of Sunflower can be found. You only have to watch the first minute to see how she's portrayed.


“Kenneth noticed that people of color and poor people are either absent or servants to the rich, white, pretty people.”

The Pastoral Symphony is a short musical piece in the Fantasia collection which shows many pretty light skinned (and furred, I guess) centaurs just relaxing and getting pampered by cherubs. And one of the centaurs has a little black centaur, named Sunflower, as a servant to shine her hooves and puts flowers in her hair.



This is Sunflower. Need I say more? The exaggerated features are meant to be offensive, not to be a creative portrayal of a black centaur.


“Tyler pointed out that the roles of men are limited as well. Men must be virile and wield power or be old and the object of “good-natured” humor.”

Wow, right on the spot with this cartoon.

The cherubs see handsome, light skinned (furred) male centaurs coming and try to make the vain female centaurs even more beautiful by fixing their hair just right and adding things like fancy hats. The female centaurs are completely obsessed with how they look, you can tell just by the way that they act.

The male centaurs are handsome and confident and all handle themselves as if they could be prices or men of power. They all act the same, just like the females do. They're the same character painted different colors.

When the male centaurs come, another disturbing thing happens.


The centaurs pair up. Except, they don't just flirt and pair up and fall in love, the pinkish red male centaur goes after the pink female centaur. The blue male centaur goes after the blue female centaur, and the two centaurs with yellow hair get together. What does this tell kids? Well, it tells them that the best match is someone who looks the most like you. Which, if possible, makes the portrait of Sunflower even worse. They're not just saying that darker skinned people are beneath lighter skinned people, but also implying that there shouldn't be any romantic relations between people who are different.



Later in the cartoon, a fat drunken man is brought in by the centaurs. He acts very foolishly and flirts with the female centaurs. This just brings us back to the “old and the object of “good-natured” humor.” He isn't handsome or very young and he's fat, but he engages in humorous activities like chasing around the female centaurs and trying to dance with them.

I focused my response to the reading mainly on one example that I think is exactly the kind of message that Christensen wants people to be aware of. If you were to ask parents straight out

“Would you encourage teaching your child that black people are beneath white people, that beauty is the most valuable thing a woman can have, that men have to be powerful and strong in order to attract a pretty woman, that old fat men drink a lot and like to flirt with younger woman, and that dating should be strictly limited to the people who are the most like yourself?”

do you think they would support most of those ideas? Probably not. Any parent who does needs to take FNED 345 at RIC. I think that's what Christensen is trying to say. We don't support many of these messages verbally, so it's time to start finding the hidden messages that are being sent to children so that we can stop them.

I don't think that telling a little girl not to watch Cinderella is the right thing to do either. Let her watch it. Then TALK to her about it. Explain how people used to think about woman, and how she should think of herself. I think once every little girl is told that being a princess doesn't have to be their biggest wish, many more creative ideas will open up to them.

The same goes for all the little boys out there who were screamed at for even picking up a Barbie doll. It's ridiculous and poor little boys have it the worst. At least little girls can get away with playing with trucks if they want to, male children are so limited to the things that they're supposed to like that it's sickening.