It was MLK weekend and the whole country was preaching love your neighbor as you love yourself. The timing was right! The next day in class, I passed out index cards and asked my students to write down three things in their lives for which they were not responsible.

Teachers and professors used to have the privilege and “freedom” to explore the concepts that would broaden and enrich the young minds in their classrooms.

Based on my world view to help my students see and understand their world from a different perspective, I introduced certain “truths” they ought to face in the adult world they were entering. How they see themselves, how they see other people, and how other people see them.

A few of these “truths” were their parents, their race and their religion, and my philosophy class was just the right place to get them started!

It was MLK weekend and the whole country was preaching love your neighbor as you love yourself. The timing was right!

The next day in class, I passed out index cards and asked my students to write down three things in their lives for which they were not responsible.

No one came close to what I had hoped for.

And so, we began to explore a few complex subjects and an interesting semester began with discussions on parents, race and religion.

My hope was to help them see themselves and their world through different lenses.

The broad question was, when you were born “who was responsible for giving you those parents, that race and that religion?”

The truth is, the three things that babies are not responsible for at birth are:

• Their parents — they did not choose their parents. Their parents gave birth, a boy or a girl arrived, everyone proclaims what a beautiful baby, but the baby did not ask for that mom and dad or those grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. Poor baby had no choice. And that name! Did baby want to be named Pat or Carol? John or Jeff?
• Their race — no one in this world ever chose their race or skin color, and yet so many of us pay dearly for our pigmentation! Why would anybody choose a race that would give them lifelong struggles, and be hated for that color.
• Their religion — which baby ever asked to be Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, Christian, Muslim?

As babies and children grow up, they accept their parents, love them, can’t change them, and so they spend the rest of their lives with their parents and in time may even become their care-givers.

Their race is more complex. It is not the race that is the problem. It is how society perceive race that is the problem. It is how the parents treat the subject of race in the home that shapes the thinking of their children — the next generation. “Children learn what they live.” Did their parents love and respect all races — all skin colors — all people around them? Their formative years — home and school — is when they observe and absorb the world around them. They learn to love and respect people, not hate and disrespect the people’s race. That is a thin line. People cannot change their race.

Their religion is the easy part. Children go along with their parents’ religion and either stick with it, change it or ditch it, as the world takes over their soul.

The goal of education is to broaden the minds of our children/students. In today’s classrooms, there is more “do not teach” than there is “teach.”

With today’s lack of “freedom of speech” under fire in the academic world, what subjects can be discussed in a philosophy or sociology class is anybody’s guess.

Can today’s students discuss race or religion in an open classroom?

How in the name of intelligence can they hold an intelligent conversation, respectfully discuss the life and times of race and religion without conflict and blows if they are not taught?

That semester, those kids were open to certain complex subjects and being able to discuss them, it gave them a better understanding of the world around them.

They knew that they cannot change their parents or their race. They knew that they had to accept those. They knew that they can change their names and their religion.

One hopes that the most important take away was for them to look at their world with a different set of lenses, to learn to analyze and think critically before passing judgement on people of different races and religions.

Back then, free speech and exploring concepts were permitted in classrooms. Today, the education department would have me arrested for teaching critical thinking.

I miss my classroom!