Teaching Tolerance

Children learn what they live. Bullard grew up in a home where empathy and respect for all persons, regaurdless of color, was actively practiced and taught. Her father, a white southern Baptist minister, was one of the first to open his church doors to blacks. He helped with racial peace in North Carolina during the Civil Rights Movement. In 1991 Bullard stated, "Teaching Tolerance, " the education project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This book is for parents and teachers in their raising and teaching children to be free of prejudice.

Bullard writes, "In general, tolerance is a way of thinking, feeling, and acting that gives us peace in our indivduality, respect for those who are unlike us, the wisdom to discern humane values, and courage to act upon them. She writes that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used the Greek term agape to describe a universal love that "discovers the neighbor in every man it meets." She also writes that "tolerance is the ability to let people be who they are." Tolerance is accepting all people no matter their differences based on race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, class or other circumstances. Bullard argues that prejudice is not innate, it is primarily learned attitudes that originate in the home or environment.

Bullard stresses many times in her book that to teach children tolerance, it's not enough to know what tolerance is; parents must live it. "the journey towards tolerance begins when we recognize and try to heal the intolerance in ourselves...change begins when we look within ourselves in the mirror and tell the truth in what we see. If our goal it to guide our children towards lives of tolerance, we must first recognize the intolerance that shapes our own lives...This is not an easy willingness to endue the pain that self-awareness brings, and faith that change possible...Only when we examine ourselves honestly, and find some satisfaction in who we are, can we finally look at the people around us with a more generous heart."

She continues, "Children who are brought up without strong bonds of family love, consistant discipline, and models of moral behavior become adults who are fearful, insecure, distrustful, and self-centered--the very traits intolerance thrives upon.

"Children who are sure of their parents' love, who have had consistent guidence in moral issues, and who have witnessed the priciples of tolerance in action in their own families, are likely to become open-minded and compassionate adults."

Bullard quotes the work of Harvad socil psychological Gordon Allport, "Children brought up in a rejective home, exposed to ready-made prejudices, will scarely be in a postion to devolp a trustful or affiliative outlook upon social realtionships. Having recieved little affection, they are not in a postion to give it."

My own mother tells me that when she was growing up, she never heard her mother utter any negative comment about anyone ot any group of people. She said she wanted to pass this modeling on to her own children.

Morris Dees, the executive chairman of the Southern Poverty Law Center writes in the forward, "We can conduct our lives as living lessons for tolerance. I predict that you will learn much more than you'll teach your child when you read this book. Your child will then learn from your lives. Future generations in your family, it is hoped, will tell stories of things you did toward other in a loving, caring way."