A damaging lesson

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views March 15, 2004]

Here's news of another multicultural zealot, who gets to impose her dogma on impressionable students. We learn from the Las Vegas Review-Journal (2/6/04), that Lora Mazzulla, a librarian at Manch Elementary School, designed an unusual project for Black History Month. The school's principal and others learned of Mazzulla's oddball approach to acknowledging the month, when angry parents, responding to their distressed children, called the school to complain.

It seems that the clever librarian (who is white) concocted a plan for classes, which involved separating students by race, and then openly giving preferential treatment to the black students. And what did the lesson accomplish? Apparently, it has brought about unnecessary conflict and disturbances among the students. The Review-Journal reports:

One perturbed parent gave a detailed account of what her crying 9-year-old child told her after school Tuesday, saying Mazzulla began class by seating black children at one set of tables and everyone else across the room.

"All the African-American children were given board games to play, and everyone else had to put their heads at the table, and they weren't to look up or speak," said Stacey Gough, whose daughter Amber is a third-grader at Manch. "She told them that she believes in everything that Martin Luther King (Jr.) had to say and she wanted the white children to know what it was like to be black back then."

Mazzulla then allowed the black children to taunt their white classmates, Gough said her daughter told her.

"The black children were making fun of the white children, and saying things like, 'You deserve this for what your ancestors did to us,' and the teacher was letting them," Gough said.

School District officials could not confirm that Mazzulla allowed taunting, but generally acknowledged the rest of Gough's account.

According to the Review-Journal, a so-called elementary education expert claimed that "it appears Mazzulla had good intentions but went about them in a misguided manner." And what, indeed, were those "good intentions" -- that white children be battered with ugly stories of man's injustices to man, while being made to feel responsible for them? And what kind of lesson is learned by black children, when they are taught to expect favoritism as a duty from whites?

The Review-Journal concludes:

Gough said her daughter remains upset because it has provoked ongoing taunting at the school between children of different races. The worst part of the incident, Gough said, is that her daughter has developed a skewed vision of what the color of someone's skin signifies.

"She never saw another child for being part of another race until yesterday," Gough said Wednesday. "Now she's afraid that the black kids hate her for something she doesn't know anything about." . . .

Gough remains both angry and puzzled. "What was the point of that lesson? My daughter keeps asking me, 'What did we do to the black people?' ... This didn't teach the kids anything."

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