Childhood

When we are all kids there was no race barrier, color barrier, and no ethnic barriers. I explained a program in class called "Playing for Peace", and it was developed by a young man who played basketball his entire life. The game have him more than competition, it brought him happiness and he wanted to bring that to other countries, and started in Ireland, where there are literally walls dividing the Catholics and Protestants. He wanted to make a difference and that is exactly what he is doing now by having catholic and protestant children coming to a mutual site to play the game of basketball and allowing them to see for themselves what a person of another religion is like, so they realize there are very little differences. It is in our childhood that our brain doesn't see the difference in these barriers. You see the person as the person they are and that is how it should be. We have now become a society that needs everybody to be in a category and for some reason we need a category to justify in a way who we are. These ideas have become concrete in our heads already but the younger children can change that and maybe adapt the idea of the salad bowl which i think can be of help when talking to young students. Either way you can develop groups and teach it in schools but if the people that surround you growing up have different ideas, will it really make a difference?

Peter Ferguson Post #6