“Where Have We Been? Where are We Headed? What is My Part?”

Abstract

Beginning with Old Leupp Boarding School, and advancing to the World War II Japanese- American Isolation camp that was later housed in the same buildings as Old Leupp Boarding School, the emphasis of this curriculum is differentiated treatment of groups because of their ethnic background and cultural differences. It concentrates on the connections between the boarding school students and the Japanese-Americans assigned to the isolation camp. By bringing the history of these two groups together, the understanding of local and national history becomes much clearer and provides a multi-cultural aspect of presentation sometimes missing
from school textbooks.
The focus of this curriculum is to walk the students through an exploration of incidents of ethnic inequality and to leave them empowered to become world changers. There is no reason for the children to feel a sense of guilt over what has happened in the past. They clearly were not the perpetrators of these harsh conditions. The students descended from the groups that were sent to stay in boarding schools or interned in the relocation camps need not feel an increasing sense of victimization. These are the stories of their ancestors; whose stories need to be told in order to make sense of today’s world. The focus should be on accurate presentation of history and learning from it in order to generate a better world now and a future world of true equal opportunity.