Teachin Tolerance In America

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Teaching Tolerance in America In the essay Teaching Tolerance in America, Author Dudley Erskine Devlin touches on the problem with the teenagers in U.S high schools “not appreciating and welcoming the differences in culture, race heritage and personal identity.” He describes how this problem is coming from bullies and the social elite cliques that single out the differences in others in order to “ridicule, taunt, or even bully another group.” Administration and faculty not seeing the severity of the problem, and not holding students accountable for the disparaging remarks and behaviors against one another is also mentioned as being a problem in his eyes. “Liberal solutions”, like talking about diversity issues in class, and having sensitivity training are not the answer, according to Devlin. Dress codes, gender segregation, id tags, more video cameras, drug sniffing dogs and anti riot trained faculty are the solutions Devlin says will effectively address the problem of Intolerance, and prejudice. Devlin cites facts from several different books throughout his article, and believes that “the class system that is perpetuated by student cliques is the most important problem in our high schools today. There are some really strong contradictions in Devlin's article. He says that “helping students appreciate and welcome differences in culture, racial heritage, and personal identity, are increasingly hard to teach.” Yet Devlin’s solutions offer up ideas like enforcing a “dress code”, having gender segregated classes, making the students where I.D tags so they would be easily identified by cameras, having more drug sniffing dogs, and random spot checks of cars and lockers. Turning the schools into a police state does not set a good example for tolerance. Dress codes do not show tolerance. Gender segregation is not going to teach men and women to work together as

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