This past work week I spent a couple of days in middle school classrooms working with students. I was explaining to them my school district's rules for usage of the Internet and email. They sign a big, long document explaining all of the rules, but it's SO long that I worry sometimes that the students don't understand it.
That's not important to what I'm writing about, though. Here's what is: Above the whiteboard in this classroom the teacher had placed a number of educational posters. These posters were meant to inspire students to exhibit positive qualities. At the top of the poster in large print was a good positive quality ("Be Courageous" or "Be Inventive"). Running down the left side of the poster were various ways that students could exhibit these qualities in a school setting. And in the middle of the poster was a famous figure from history that exhibited that quality.
As an idea, the posters were fine, and the poster that said "Be A Leader" and that had George Washington on it I had no problem with, nor did I have a problem with putting George Washington Carver on the "Be Inventive" poster. But THIS poster, as I said, made me laugh out loud AND cringe at the same time:
How in the WORLD do you pair Frederick Douglass with the idea of being cooperative? He was an escaped slave who--according to his own autobiography--learned to read and write with the help of the children of his slave owners, and who was beaten for attempting to get an education. But still he persevered, and when the opportunity presented itself, he escaped to the north, where he spent the rest of his life working for the rights of African-Americans. That doesn't sound like cooperation to me!
If, as a slave, Douglass had been given this poster, and if he'd followed the encouragement to be cooperative, he probably would have just accepted his life as a slave and worked hard to do what his masters said.
Maybe the poster should have said, "Be Courageous," for Douglass certainly was, or "Be a Role Model," for he did serve to any naysayers as an example of what blacks could become. But "cooperative"?
As I said, I don't know whether to laugh or be offended.
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