Thursday, June 02, 2005
Umm...
Wha?
Also.... Waa!
Jefferson Elementary School community members voted last week to change the school’s name to Sequoia Elementary following months of controversial debate about its namesake, former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, owning slaves.
Jefferson parents, students and teachers opted to rename the school after the three Sequoia trees on the school’s campus.
Oh, thank God! The horror is over!
Wait... I heard that those Sequoia trees have been using up light from the sun and halting development of plants in its shade!!! With such behavior, can we really allow the name of these trees to be on our schools? Fight for justice! Change the name!
The vote pleased those who had lobbied to change the name.
That's a shock. I wonder if it disappointed those who had lobbied to keep the name the same.
Jefferson parent Deborah Agre, who voted for Sequoia, said the debate was a good chance for the community "to try and understand feelings that are outside their own experience."
"I don't personally have a visceral response to the name Jefferson—to me it's just the name of the school," Agre said. "But I understand that other people do, and I think that's a good enough reason."
Wow... people pleasing 101. Anyway, it's good that the community could try and understand feelings outside their experience. And now that we've changed the name, we've ensured that such an attempt at understanding should never, ever happen again. Or... actually, that's a bad thing, isn't it?
Agre said the debate over Jefferson's slave-owning background convinced her 9-year-old son Eli Baum, who had intended to vote against the name change to ultimately put down "Sequoia" on his ballot.
"I said, 'Why did you vote for Sequoia over Jefferson?' and he said, 'Because Jefferson owned slaves,'" Agre said.
Oh, sure, that shows that the kids understood. Of course, any real parent might have asked "but that's not an explanation. Why does his owning slaves mean you should've voted Sequoia over Jefferson?" to which the kid would respond "Uh... uh... people said that it was the reason... uh... um..." (By the way, these kinds of incomplete justifications hardly end at elementary school... anyone who's graded a test, especially in lower division sciences, knows that. I wonder why college students haven't picked up these skills? I'm sure it has nothing to do with cases like this.)
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