Teachers are under attack from all quarters, but educating kids about racism is only part of the solution. The massive expenditure on the “Just Say No” campaign didn’t avert an opioid epidemic. The tremendous effort to raise awareness about bullying hasn’t made kids any less likely to bully someone, and Me Too may have made sexual predators more careful, but I fear they will always be with us.

Education only goes so far, and the seed of an idea needs fertile soil to take root. The sad fact is that human beings have a tendency to want to be king of the hill, and those who can’t get to the top on merit, attempt to do so by demeaning and denigrating others for any reason they can find.

I’m in my sixties and I had a ringside seat to the civil rights movement. We learned about slavery in school. We also learned about the Holocaust (I was shown “Night and Fog” several times in different classes.) Yet, many people my age are still racist and anti-Semitic. We thought back then that education was fixing these things, but it could only do so much. It sent overt racism underground for a while, but it didn’t take much to embolden it to rise to the surface. I hope we can find a way to eradicate it, but it’s going to continue to be a struggle.