A fifth grade class in Murfreesboro, TN learned about the civil rights movement this month by staging a protest march … against junk food.

Here’s the meat of the article:

After a two-week lesson on civil rights, the students picked their own issue, eating healthy and exercise, and marched in protest.

Parent Belinda Pate said she thought it was a good way to get the history lesson across, plus healthy eating a exercise are “what us parents are always trying to protest with our kids.”

The teachers also had the students wear different colored T-shirts – either red, green or blue – and treated the groups differently depending on what color they wore.

For example on the way to the protest, red-shirted students had to sit in the back of the bus, blue-shirts sat in the middle and weren’t allowed to talk, and green-shirts could sit in the front of the bus and talk all they wanted, student Asha Phillips explained.

The teachers also made different groups use different bathrooms at school.

This kind of thing leaves me deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, it’s great to see kids learning about activism and organizing in school, and being encouraged to think of themselves as potential activists. 

On the other hand…

If you think about what would have happened if the “protest” had been about a controversial subject — gay teachers, say, or prayer in the schools — you see just how problematic the exercise is. Because you really couldn’t do an event like that. Whatever position the class adopted would be offensive to somebody’s parent, and probably go against the values of at least a few of the kids. This “protest” was only possible because it wasn’t the contemporary equivalent of a civil rights march. And that’s not even getting into the whole t-shirt thing.

I don’t want to get off on too much of a rant here. I’m sure these teachers meant well, and I give them credit for trying to bring this particular moment in history alive. But teaching about social justice movements is hard. It’s challenging. If you make it easy, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Anyway, that’s my reaction. What’s yours?