Teaching Children about MLK

I live in Oak Park, Il., which is the best place I have ever lived. My 4 year old son goes to a pre-school class from noon to 2:30 every day, at Longfellow School.

I am home for a bit right now, so I went and sat in on the class with my son. In honor of MLK day, they were teaching the kids about MLK in a way befitting their age. So the teacher was reading a story about MLK's childhood, how he grew up and his relationship with his grandmother. After the story, the teacher had the kids act out a play about Rosa Parks.

Most of the kids were not there that day because it was so cold. In the class, there is a typical Oak Park mixture of backgrounds. Oak Park is known as a progressive community, and most of the people that live here work very hard to make this community progressive.

You could see it being taught to the kids - be nice to people, do not be mean, ect, but there was something missing from this particular class and instruction. It was wonderful to see. These kids literally do not have any context to imagine why someone would be discriminated against because of color. Rosa Parks who wanted to sit down in a bus, was just people being mean to each other, not racism, because the kids didn't have any understanding of why that might happen.

You can see it in the Oak Park kids. They are going to have to be taught that racism exists and to guard against it, but their direct experience with it is going to be muted and so much smaller than my generations experience. They may understand it with their minds only, thank god...