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Protest Songs in the Classroom

Picture books can help 5-year-olds explore social justice topics and nonviolence. The resulting discussion is the start of a peace curriculum.

I am in awe of young people. Today, for example, I read about a group of teens in Louisville, Ky. who continued to speak on LGBT issues. High school students from duPont Manual High School were censored for writing about gay issues, but they refused to let their voices be silenced. They decided to run an underground paper, The Red Pen, and won the annual Courage in Student Journalism Award.

Let’s talk about voting. Yesterday, we asked our 65,000 Facebook followers if they had held mock elections in their schools. We heard from one lone voice that reported her middle school had 100 percent turnout.

As a child I asked my father whether there was someone like Martin Luther King Jr. who had fought for Latino rights. “Yes,” he said, and told me that his name was César Chávez. My father, a former farmworker who had toiled in the agricultural fields from childhood until adulthood, taught me about César Chávez, Dolores Huerta and the farmworker struggle.

My parents stopped patronizing our local cinema when I was a child because they were livid when the theater owner demanded to see a copy of my birth certificate as proof that I could pay the child admission price. The boycott lasted six years. Although it satisfied my mother’s desire to “not give that theater” her money, the theater’s business didn’t crumble. I am not sure it prevented the theater’s management from treating another young girl the same way.

The anniversary of the integration of Little Rock’s public schools gives us the opportunity to reexamine the long-term, societal impact of the Supreme Court’s 1954 'Brown v. Board of Education' decision.

I was excited by my lesson plan about the presidential elections. I planned to help students research issues and form opinions by guiding them through a variety of perspectives. Then my student teacher asked a question that surprised me. “Do you ever have parents complain about elections being discussed in school?” he wanted to know. “Why would they?” I asked.