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December 30, 2004

The Power of 1

Today on the Jane Pauley Show (I know, I know), the subject was Whitwell Middle School, a school in rural TN that launched a project around learning about the Holocaust. Whitwell is a small town, the school is only 400 students. The town has no Catholics, no Jews, and school has only 5 black students and one hispanic. One of the teachers went to a conference and heard a Holocaust survivor speak, and realized that he didn't know anything about it, and neither did any of the students or most of the people in Whitwell.

This, is the problem with this country - in my mind at least. Not that people don't know about things like this, but that we who do don't realize that there are actually, truly, people who just don't. They may know things exist, know of them, but they don't have any reason to know the details of what, for some of us, shapes who we are. And these people, who have never had any reason to know this stuff, are good people. With hearts and minds and feelings.

The story follows their choice to learn all the details and the actions that came out of their learning. The principal of the school said the most profound thing she learned from the experience was the power of one. how one person can touch and enrich the lives of so many others through the sharing of knowledge and experience. Amen.

The teacher who started the project talked about the fact that he was born and raised in the same town, and his father (who he said he loved to death) would think nothing of making racial comments and slurs. When the teacher went to college, he had a black roommate who he "loved like a brother" but would think nothing of making racial slurs in front of him. That doing this project had made him think about that experience in a different light and he hoped that he "hadn't hurt him" (the roommate. Clearly, he probably did). The teacher went on, through tears, to say that now that he has two sons, he will never use language like that in front of them, b/c to hear his sons repeat it and know that they learned it from him would be the "worst thing in the world."

Ignorance is bad. It's bad bad bad bad. But sometimes (and yes, not all the time), the ignorance is not on purpose, it's not aggressive, it's not even concious. Once the ignorance has been uncovered, and then ignored, or chosen, then the ass whoopin's may begin. But first, consider giving people a chance, consider that what's common knowledge to you may not even be a part of someone else's world - they may not even know they have the option of letting it in. And that once they do, they may even become an ambassador for change along with you.

Link to the summary of the show on Jane Pauley

Link to the project page on the school's website

Link to the Mirimax documentary page

Posted by nikl at December 30, 2004 10:57 AM

Comments

so true. call me naive, but i think it is important and necessary to educate people as widely as possible so that 1) more people will have knowledge of the world beyond their own and 2) there will be an increased liklihood that the awareness can be spread by association. it's amazing when one person has the guts to reach out to many the way the teacher in this situation did-with no guarantee of how the school or town would respond.

Posted by: kira at December 30, 2004 02:06 PM

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