Tolerance.Org, Dana Williams Comments on Burgeoning Alternative

¶ … Tolerance.org, Dana Williams comments on burgeoning alternative student break programs that include hands-on encounters with the history of race relations and cultural diversity in America. The trend was started by Jeff Steinberg, a California high school teacher who took a class on a tour of southern civil rights sites. Because of the positive reception he received from the initial field trip, Steinberg formed an organization dedicated to helping students learn about the civil rights movement by taking them on tours of the Deep South. His organization, Sojourn to the Past, the people and places they learn about in the classroom come to life. Other alternative break programs such as those sponsored by the organization Break Away encourage community service and other means of encountering diversity first-hand. Operation Understanding DC fosters understanding among the black and Jewish communities of Washington, DC, while the Other America Tour enables students to visit other parts of their home cities to interact with persons of different class, ethnic, and religious backgrounds.

I wish I had been able to participate in one of the many programs that Dana Williams describes in her article. These hands-on encounters enhance traditional forms of education because they eliminate classroom boredom. There is nothing more exciting for students than a field trip, and an extended educational field trip has enormous potential for the future of education. Hopefully, programs like these can become more the norm, more of an established part of public school curricula. We need to introduce children to community service as well, to encourage more people to become socially aware. I always learn more from first-hand encounters than from textbooks; trips that place students face-to-face with such things as racism and other social issues contributes immensely to personal growth.