Color Blind Education

Diversity Day at prep school involved signing up for a series of classes that amounted to a sort of camp arts and crafts day of mayan pottery or african mask making. The only thing I remember specifically is that it all ended with everyone in the gym listening to a steel drum band. I think the drummers were also high school kids shipped in from some other school somewhere where, perhaps, they had signed up for a steel drumming class because it actually was still a relevant part of their culture. Or maybe not. Point is, there was certainly very little attempt made to make any of this relevant to us. Listen to world music and check out folk art and see and hear how different people from around the world are. This is no way to work multiculturalism into a curriculum.

Here's my thought and I know I'm in way over my head but I started thinking about when my parents and I were discussing my 8 year old nephew who is at a blessedly color blind stage of existence. First disclaimer - Even as I think about writing this, I feel like what I will say is going to smack of "everything is relative" identity based politics. But I'm just trying here.

I'm really into the Roots project. I think this is actually a thing but if it isn't it should be. Even the most homogenous classroom gets less so if you trace back the students' ancestry a couple of generations. If every classroom knew more details about their friends' backgrounds and their friends grandparents' and great grandparents cultures and beliefs, there would be a human face for the steel drumming. The friend before them wouldn't have changed but he would certainly have grown in complexity, for himself as well.

I'm interested in that too. Then it wouldn't just be "minority" students, and of course minority would be different in every classroom, who have something distinctive about them. It would be everyone. Am I wrong? I know I'm being too simplistic but in a country of immigrants, shouldn't we spend more time diving into our backgrounds and not in a political campaign, my grandfather was a pig farmer in Ireland kind of way. But hands on.

My favorite research project and there would be so many components to this that it could be a part of almost every class (math, social studies, english, etc.) would be to recreate a day in the life of your great grandparents. What other classes or projects do you wish you had in school that would have aided your multicultural education?