Group's goal is to help kids conquer hate

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

It was just another breakfast. I didn't want to go.

Eight a.m. is too early for small talk and smiles. I enjoy sitting at my kitchen table, reading the paper in silence, then facing the day.

But Karen Schwartzman from the Bank of Boston called and lured me. She said I'd get a chance to meet Margot Stern Strom, who is not only the executive director of Facing History and Ourselves but one of its two founders.

Facing History and Ourselves is the Brookline-based educational organization which works with students confronting and exploring the causes of hate and prejudice. Its goal is to get kids thinking, to make them recognize their individual and moral responsibilities, and to let them know that every one of them can make a difference in the world.

It's an organization I've long admired, so Schwartzman had me hooked right then. She went on to add that the guest speaker, Boston Police Lieutenant Detective Bill Johnston, was fabulous, a riveting orator, who would talk about his experiences with hate.

So off I went and am glad I did. The breakfast, sponsored by the Bank of Boston, was a means of introducing to other Boston businesses the work Facing History has been doing for the past 15 years, and to get these businesses to consider supporting the program, which is private and non-profit.

Now taught in 1,600 classrooms across the county country, Facing History was begun in the Brookline school system, the result of a conversation then-superintendent Dr. Robert Sperber had with a man who had lost family in the Holocaust. The man asked Sperber, "How do the schools teach children about these events?"

The fact was that the schools didn't. Most still don't.

Spurred by the question, Sperber arranged for three regional conferences chaired by teachers in private, parochial and public schools. Ideas were exchanged, goals were set and in 1976 Margot Stern Strom and Bill Parsons developed a curriculum called Holocaust and Human Behavior. Their belief was and remains still that schools and teachers, in order to be significant to children, must present a significant curriculum.

What could be more significant than how a nation could take it upon itself not just to subjugate an entire race, but to exterminate that race? What could be more important than studying the roots of hatred that allowed a civilized, educated populace to go along with this plan?

Over the years, the curriculum has expanded because hate didn't begin and it didn't end in Germany. In Facing History, all kinds of prejudices are confronted, and ordinary people who've have made a difference in people's lives, are studied.

Strom calls them the unsung heroes and heroines. A black man who couldn't buy a bus ticket at the Greyhound station when he was growing up goes in joins the a Army at 18 and ends up at Buchenwald liberating people. He had power.

Everyone has power. Everyone can change the ways things are.

The power of individual responsibility is what kids take away from Facing History.

Individual responsibility is what Lt.Lieutenant Detective Johnston stressed, too. He spoke about going undercover under cover and the hatred he encountered when people thought he was gay. He spoke about the torture of a black family by white neighbors.

But the most important thing he spoke about was this: He said standing up to his peers is the toughest thing he has to do, s - saying to individuals or to groups, "I won't allow you to say those words { (racial epithets)} in front of me. " - is the toughest thing he has to do.

Haters are cowards, he said. When you confront them, when you shine a light on them, they retreat like vampires.

When you ignore them, their power grows.

Facing History and Ourselves has been a beacon of light for 15 years. The program should be in every school. For it's much harder to cure a disease than to prevent it. And hate is a disease that is epidemic and that is killing this country.