When my niece Kelly was seven years old, she developed odd tics - blinking her eyes rapidly, jerking her arms, then her legs, then convulsing her entire body. Grunts followed the tics. She attempted to make them sound like hiccups. At school she stood alone at recess; during lunch she ate alone. Kids tormented her, mimicking her sounds and movements. When her tics and noises distracted the class, her teachers placed her desk in the hallway. Some days they sent her to the principal's office. When Kelly was in 8th grade, my sister discovered that her condition had a name - Tourette's Syndrome.
How did this affect Kelly? She hated going to school. She feigned illness. Some days when she was unable to endure the teasing and isolation, she ran home. Eventually she dropped out of high school and spent years regaining the dignity that students and teachers stripped her of when she was a child. Kelly is not alone in her history. While most children don't have a medical condition that causes their isolation, too many children learn that their race, class, or language can set them up as targets in our society.
Unfortunately, many people experience acts of injustice daily. Sometimes these injustices occur in the form of an unkind comment about a person's weight, facial features, hair, or clothes. But often these injustices target people because of their race, language, or religion. Too often injustice moves beyond words. People are denied housing, jobs, fair wages, or decent education. As both history and daily news have informed us: People are physically abused - sometimes even killed - because of these differences.
But kids don't have to be cruel; in fact, part of our roles as teachers and administrators in schools should be to intervene when children hurt others, but more importantly, our job is to educate them to disrupt unjust behavior.
We can accomplish this by teaching about people who worked for change - Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, John Brown, Rosa Parks, Dolores Huerta, and other larger than life heroes who struggled to end slavery and injustice - so students have role models. We can teach them about the Abolition and Civil Rights Movements, so students learn how to collaborate with others for change. But we also need to stop them from teasing a child who does not speak English as a first language or to stand up for the overweight girl in Algebra.