I saw something quite sad yesterday. I was assiting in an 8th grade social studies class, and the teacher was having her students fill out a questionaire on the Civil Rights movement, so that she would know how much background they already had, before planning the unit. It was a list of terms. They were supposed to put a check mark next to anything they had heard of at all, and write a few words telling what they knew about it, if anything.

Few, if any, students new what NAACP stood for. "Freedom Riders", "seperate but equal", "Huey Newton", and "Brown vs. The Board of Education" drew similar blanks. A few students even had trouble stating what "civil rights" or "voter registration" meant.

Over half of the students in the class were black. They attended a school named after a civil rights pioneer. Last month was Black History Month. And did I mention that they were 8th graders? All I can hope is that the kids were just extremely lazy yesterday afternoon, rather than that ignorant. If the latter is the case, I do hope they are far less so after they finish that social studies unit.