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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (276006)	10/22/2008 7:37:37 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793843

first the language The Son Also Rises Boys to Men, Outside the Stereotypes By William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn When our children were young, they attended a wonderful daycare center in New York City directed by an extraordinary and talented woman named B.J. Richards. “B.J.’s Kids” was housed in a public school, and it became famous in those years among early childhood educators as a liberating and empowering environment for young children. B.J. had developed a dazzling collection of nonracist and nonsexist children’s books, for example, and inclusive posters sang out from the walls in the hallways and classrooms. She was always willing to talk about fairness with the kids, and to encourage them to criticize whatever unfairness they witnessed in the world around them: “It’s unfair in this story that only the boys are doing fun things, while the girls just stand around watching” or “I don’t think it’s fair to have a bear dressed like a Native American and then call him ‘wild.’” At B.J.’s Kids, parents and teachers struggled to free our language from the constraints of a sexist society, and it became natural to hear conversations laced with terms like “mail carrier,” “police officer,” “cowhand,” and “waitron” (waiter or waitress, an evolution from the clumsy “wait person”). Not only did “firefighter” replace “fireman,” but the center’s play area featured a poster of a black firefighter in action, and the toy block area had a unique collection of little figures and wedgies that included a white male nurse and an Asian woman firefighter. B.J.’s Kids was across the street from the firehouse, where the firefighters, however, were exclusively white and male. The kids visited often, trying on the hats and ringing the bell, and of course, finding their nonsexist, nonracist world collided with some hard realities--such as the time one of the hosts told the visiting kids that he hoped there would never be any women working at the firehouse because they would never be as good as the men at fighting fires. Four-year-old Megan led the chorus in unison--“UNFAIR!”--and the kids wrote letters to the mayor. But changing language is, after all, not the same thing as changing worlds. Neither is changing minds identical to changing institutions. Raising children to be thoughtful, caring, engaged human beings is always a challenge. In a strict class society, stratified, too, along racial and gender lines, gone mad with money and now making a quasi-religion out of consumption, the challenges intensify. There is no way to effectively retreat from the world as it is, but there are sensible strategies that help parents encounter that world, provide some examples for our children of hope and resistance, and raise kids who are not only capable of working and loving, but who can engage the resistant world and name themselves freely and happily in opposition. ..................... William Ayers is distinguished professor of education and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent book is A Kind and Just Parent. Bernadine Dohrn is director of the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law, Legal Clinic. She is the author of Look Out Kid, It’s Something You Did: Zero Tolerance for Children and the forthcoming Violence and Children’s Rights, edited by Valerie Polakow. Together they have three sons. sondrak.com