Parent Education Handout # 3

Reflections on Equality

"It is human beings who have made pigmentation a leprosy in our lives instead of a gift."

Anonymous

"The world is becoming more of a neighborhood, but is it anymore of a human hood? If we don't learn to live together as brothers and sisters, we will perish together as fools."

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1956

"The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."

From Souls of Black Folk (1903), W.E.B. DuBois 1868-1963

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies. . . a theft from those who hunger and are fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."

Dwight D. Eisenhower, "The Chance for Peace," delivered before the American Society of Newspaper editors, April 16, 1953

"Washing our hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful."

Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

"The treasures that lie hidden in the heart of the child spring . . . from that same heavenly world from which the soul itself originated. . ."

Daniel Udo De Haes, Waldorf Educator

"We must lay aside our limiting beliefs that girls and boys are the same, that masculine is better than feminine, or vice versa, that men are wrong, that women are wrong, that one gender is better than the other, more capable, kinder, gentler, more violent, more nurturing, smarter, more rational, inferior, easier to parent, harder to handle, and so on. . ."

Don & Joanne Elium from Raising a Daughter