There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of
curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people
outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our
elementary school materials still are. In isolated suburban
school districts children play ingenious Monopoly games revised
to impart an immediate and first-person understanding of
economic problems in the colonial period. In private schools,
kindergarten children begin to learn about numbers with brightly
colored sticks known as cuisenaire rods, and second-grade
children are introduced to mathematics through the ingenuity of
a package of odd-shaped figures known as Attribute Games. But in
the majority of schools in Roxbury and Harlem and dozens of
other slum districts stretching west across the country,
teaching techniques, textbooks, and other teaching aids are
hopelessly antique, largely obsolete, and often insulting or
psychologically oppressive for many thousands of Negro and other
minority schoolchildren. I once made a che