Many of us learned a short, sanitized history of human rights in school. The story tends to focus on progress. We once had Inquisitions and witch burnings, and then the Enlightenment put an end to that. We had slavery and Jim Crow, and then the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights movement fixed those.
The unspoken implication is that the problems are now solved. Schools teach children the injustices of history, but rarely talk about the injustice of the status quo. The message is that the evil is past, and that present authority is legitimate and benevolent.
So, what injustices will students learn about in 2100?
I think that today's mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and unequal education will be towards the top of the list. Students will learn how we once had 5% of the world's population, but 50% of the world's inmates. They'll learn how many of those inmates were in jail for nonviolent offenses, especially drug offenses. One of the root causes for the cycle of poverty, crime, and jail time is unequal education. It manifests in the many communities and schools that simply don't teach children the skills necessary to succeed or make a legitimate living. Students of the future will probably learn how some of the worst schools in the industrialized world in the early 21st century were sometimes a few miles away from the best, separated by a certain road or a set of train tracks. "Schools" with fifteen year olds that were barely literate, with armed police officers on staff, with metal detectors at the entrance.
Then, they'll learn how those injustices were fixed.
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I'm sure at some point we'll shift from punishing the poor to trying harder to empower them--or at least empower their children--to live better.
The unspoken implication is that the problems are now solved. Schools teach children the injustices of history, but rarely talk about the injustice of the status quo. The message is that the evil is past, and that present authority is legitimate and benevolent.
So, what injustices will students learn about in 2100?
I think that today's mass incarceration, the war on drugs, and unequal education will be towards the top of the list. Students will learn how we once had 5% of the world's population, but 50% of the world's inmates. They'll learn how many of those inmates were in jail for nonviolent offenses, especially drug offenses. One of the root causes for the cycle of poverty, crime, and jail time is unequal education. It manifests in the many communities and schools that simply don't teach children the skills necessary to succeed or make a legitimate living. Students of the future will probably learn how some of the worst schools in the industrialized world in the early 21st century were sometimes a few miles away from the best, separated by a certain road or a set of train tracks. "Schools" with fifteen year olds that were barely literate, with armed police officers on staff, with metal detectors at the entrance.
Then, they'll learn how those injustices were fixed.
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I'm sure at some point we'll shift from punishing the poor to trying harder to empower them--or at least empower their children--to live better.
What can we do today to be part of that?