Optimism is the Key

After both reading Part II of Educational Foundations last night and discussing in our groups today it made me think of all of the underlying struggles that arise from having such a diverse country.  Although over the years, as a whole we have come to accept our differences and worked very hard to work together, we still face problems every single day.  Our group today discussed these problems concentrating on racism.  Overall, our group agreed that yes, racism is indeed still a huge problem in America today.  However, we did have a few disagreements.  In my opinion, racism happens within each and every race and within each race, everyone has their own opinions and viewpoints.  I tend to believe that when speaking of racism, that what is mostly being meant behind it is whites discriminating against other races.  During our discussion though I brought up the other side, in which minorities discriminate against the majority.  In my opinion, this seems to be overlooked, which may be one of the main causes for this unfortunate ongoing problem.


After discussing the many aspects and viewpoints of racism, our group then discussed including this in our future careers as educators.  As educators, we all need to work together to inform our students of racism, and encourage them to go against it.  I think that this needs to start as soon as a child enters school, and continue on through their schooling.  Ultimately, the student will make his/her own decision about it, but by that time hopefully the system would have positively affected this decision.  As educators, we have discussed that we would like to express individuality and freedom in our classrooms.  Therefore in order to inform our students of racism and its negatives, we need to watch the line that interferes into their freedoms.  At the end of the day, one of our main goals is for our students to make their own decision about these significant aspects of society.  We obviously would like them to make "the right decision", which in this case would be to refrain from racism and accept everyone as equals.  But a main question that seems to come up over and over again in this particular class is......what/who decides what is right or wrong?