Next Steps in Education for Racial Understanding

The German Nazis and the Japanese have demonstrated to us how an entire nation can be educated toward an ideal. That the goal has been world conquest and the enthronement of a so-called master race is beside the point. Soviet Russia has shown how a people can be educated to build a nation strong enough to come back from a Stalingrad, tough enough to hold a Leningrad. We were shocked at the knee-pants Fascists in Mussolini's Italy and the brown-shirted, pink-cheeked boys in Hitler's Youth Corps, but they learned the Fascist-Nazi creed and grew up to wreck a world. We in America have not bothered too much, hitherto, about teaching democracy. We have chuckled from coast to coast over the fact that hardly anyone can remember the Declaration of Independence, or quote the Constitution. We have said this was a free country and let it go at that. Hitler and the Japanese have forced us to re-examine our America, its creed, its ideals, and practices. Their creed is there for to see. Every young German can recite it. Even imprisonment in America, 4,000 miles from Berlin, has not dimmed the ardor, arrogance, and conviction of Nazi warriors. Americans are beginning to realize that among the weapons we shall need to prevent another such war is education for democracy. The creed set forth in the Declaration of Independence must become a part of the lives of our people: are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. . Lt. Commander Herbert Agar, former director of Freedom House in New York and former editor of the Louisville, Ky., Courier Journal, emphasized in every speech and every writing that America must subscribe absolutely to the all men doctrine, or see our pattern of life perish. This writer would add that we must examine anew the phrase inalienable rights, especially with respect to our Negro minority, for most of the difficulty in approaching this question on the part of whites lies in their lack of understanding that are endowed with rights. They fail to understand this because they have been taught that the Negro and certain other peoples are groups apart, that they are different, and that, therefore, the code of the Western nations does not apply to them. The whites, they have been taught, can bestow or withhold rights as they see fit. This faulty education does not need to be explored in detail; it is too well known among students to need delineation here. The theory of white supremacy has been a most useful device for exploiting non-white peoples and their riches and their resources. On a world-wide scale, down through several centuries, we have had the

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• Brown -ing the American Textbook

  Open Access•Jonathan Zimmerman•History of Education Quarterly•2004

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• Making the Discriminating Mind

  Open Access•Ryan Ziols, Kathryn L Kirchgasler et al.•Teachers College Record The Voice…•2025

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