School children need to experience a day or two as slaves so they'll know that involuntary servitude is a bad thing. At least that was the idea four years ago, when a teacher in Clarksville, Tennessee, inserted a role playing exercise into her curriculum about the Civil War. According to this article, the teacher had half the students act as slaves for a day while the other half acted as masters. The teacher then switched every child's role the next day, thus assuring that every child enjoyed the full experience.Alas, the project has come to an end, and not for reasons that you would suspect. The sensible assumption is that some parents complained about the trauma their children endured. What caused the project's demise though was one student who let the project go to her head and refused to do a math assignment, telling her black teacher that she was a "master." If only I knew when I was ten that could bring a halt to my schoolwork by invoking God's name and then burying another person in the desert.
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