Article

Helping Students Build a World Without Hate

An Anti-Defamation League video inspires this teacher to help his students imagine—and build—a world in which everyone thrives. 

Brenda is a fourth-grader at my elementary school in South Carolina. Her father and mother moved here from Mexico, and Brenda speaks Spanish at home and English at school. Fluent in both languages, she is a quiet, thoughtful child with contemplative eyes and attentive ears. Like most other fourth-graders, Brenda laughs when a friend tickles her. She cries if she falls and scrapes her knee. And she has stories to tell if you will listen. She is also a scholar and a saint in the wonderful ways a 10-year-old can be scholarly and saintly. She reads anything about everything at every opportunity and volunteers her early mornings to read to struggling first-graders.

I took a few minutes to ask Brenda about her hopes and dreams.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" I asked.

"I want to be a doctor," she answered.

When I talk with students, I often use the "5 Whys" strategy to get a better understanding of what they are thinking and feeling. For each answer a student gives, I ask why until I have five answers to the initial question.

“Why?”

"Because I think it would be a good job."

"Why?"

"Because I like to study and I want to help people."

"Why?"

"Because I want to help babies grow and experience more in the United States."

"Why?"

"Because I want to learn more about their culture. I want them to live."

Brenda does not want power, prestige or position. She wants to help people...live. It is as simple and as complex as that.

Her answer helped me think about “Imagine a World Without Hate”™ a video the Anti-Defamation League created to celebrate its 100th anniversary.

As John Lennon's song “Imagine” plays in the background, people read, browse and watch news with such imagined headlines as:

  • Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 84, Champions Immigration Reform
  • Anne Frank Wins Nobel Prize for her 12th Novel
  • Harvey Milk Expands LGBT Equality Globally
  • Daniel Pearl, 49, Journalist, wins Pulitzer for "Uncovering Al-Qaeda"
  • James Byrd, Jr., 63, Jasper, TX Resident Saves Young Girl From Burning Building

This video inspires thought and asks the searching question: "What could these individuals have continued to contribute to society if bigotry, hate and extremism had not cut their lives tragically short?"

It is a great question.

The question for me, as a teacher, is not so much: "What could have been?" but "What can be?"

I think of Brenda. I hope she takes up the work these people started and carries it forward with her life. She wants to become a doctor so she can help people live. With that spirit, she will help these martyrs live, too.

As a teacher, it is my job not only to help students imagine a world without hate, but to help them find the tools and the heart to build it. That is how I can build a world without hate. Imagine...and let it be.

Barton is an elementary school teacher in South Carolina.

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