Absolutely no indoctrination here
MONDAY, March 3, 2003, 8:06 p.m.
“Morales and Peterson said their goal was not to indoctrinate children.”
Now this is what you might call ironic.
MPS Board member Jennifer Morales and Bob Peterson, who heads up a group called “Teachers Against War,” are spearheading the movement to require every Milwaukee school to hold a forum on Iraq.
Morales says she got the idea after a reading a story in “Rethinking Schools,” a paper that Peterson helps edit.
But that same paper included a story by Peterson describing how he goes about teaching controversial issues. His class exercises, for example, include having his students sing songs with such catchy lyrics as:
"we hold these truths to be self-evident:# 1 george w. bush is not president/
# 2 america is not a true democracy/
#3 the media is not fooling me
Peterson teaches the fifth grade.
“Songs, like poetry,” Peterson explains, “are an important component of my teaching.” Every Monday he introduces a new protest song, giving students a copy of the lyrics they keep in their binders.
“We start each morning with the song, and usually within a day or two the children are singing along — regardless of musical genre. Sometimes I use a song to introduce a unit of study, other times at particular point in a lesson.”
This includes such catchy tunes as: “The Price of Oil,” by Billy Bragg, which Peterson describes as “A powerful song that traces the war on Iraq, U.S. support of Pinochet, and the rigged Florida election to the ‘price of oil.’ Includes mild profanity.” A sample:
it’s all about the price of oil
it’s all about the price of oil
don’t give me no shit
about blood sweat, tears and toil
it’s all about the price of oil
“It's amazing,” Peterson gushes, “what my fifth graders will remember from a song, as compared to what they forget from my talking.”
Other songs in Peterson’s arsenal include “Not in My Name," by John McCutcheon, in which he sings "But in Hiroshima, New York, or in Baghdad, it's the innocent who die for the crime." In case the song’s message is not sufficiently political, Peterson says that as part of the discussion, his fifth graders also read the “Pledge of Resistance from the Not in Our Name website and looked at a full-page newspaper ad by the same group.” The “Not in Our Name” statement was the anti-American screed that equated the 9/11 attacks with actions of the U.S. military.
Peterson also recommends that his fellow students use such songs as “Ashcroft’s Army,” which he describes as “a funny, but tragic song about how civil rights in the U.S. are being eroded; Bomb da World, by Michael Franti and Spearhead, “a rapper who records on his own Boo Boo Wax imprint”; and “Bombs Over Baghdad,” an “angry anti-war poem/song from a long-time Native-American activist.”
In addition to pushing the School Board to require forums on the war, the Journal-Sentinel reported that Peterson is leading the effort to have the teachers’ union take a stand against the war.
