Our school is into promoting good citizenship.  Each month we have a “quote of the month” that we’re encouraged to post in the classrooms and discuss with children.  September’s quote was from Jesse Jackson:

“Don’t look down on anyone unless you’re helping him up.”

That  might not be an exact quote since as soon as I saw that the quote was from Jesse Jackson, I threw away my poster.  There’s no way I would advocate anything a self-promoting racist like Jesse Jackson said, and certainly no way I would put a poster of a Jesse Jackson quote in my classroom.  I love the children I teach too much to subject them to that.

I wonder what school systems are thinking of when they come up with crap like that?  Quotes about treating each other well and being a friend to others are wonderful, and it’s important for children to learn early that people are people and that race, ethnicity  and gender make no difference in our humanity.

They need to make sure the quotes are from people we want our children to emulate - not someone like Jesse Jackson who has single-handedly caused more racial strife than probably anyone else in our modern day world.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Quotes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.