My Response to "Teaching Tolerance in America"

In the writing “Teaching Tolerance in America”, the author Dudley Erskine Devlin talks about how he feels racial and class divisions among students is tearing apart high schools. I believe he has many great points, even though my experiences at Lima Senior have not been as extreme as some of his examples.

In my own experiences, I do not think students at Lima Senior discriminate against races that are not their own. I notice that in many classrooms, we tend to sit by people who are our same race, but it is not intended maliciously. Overall, I don’t think we even care about the color of people’s skin. I think it is really funny when speakers talk to us about being more tolerant and not focusing on our differences. While the speaker is going on and on, I cannot help but think this is something I already unconsciously know and that he is only bringing more attention to our differences by making a big deal out of it. I think a student from the writing felt the same way when he said he didn’t like having notions of tolerance and acceptance “shoved down his throat”. I think the best way to learn tolerance is by interacting with people of different races and recognizing what all we have in common.

At Lima Senior I somewhat notice, at least more than racial discrimination, gender problems. There are many times I see ladies in the hallways getting unwanted attention from a group of guys. However, Devlin’s idea of having single-sex classes is ridiculous. The real world is not divided up into a male and female section, so why should a school be? There are also many relationships between males and females that are positive.

By reading this writing, I tried to evaluate situations I have been in so that I could relate. Looking at our school, I think we do pretty good in focusing more on personality than appearance. Even though Lima gets a bad rap, I think that overall we are more culturally rounded and tolerant than some schools around us.