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And on another note here's a little something that I believe in...

So I have a practical suggestion for those of you who are principals, superintendents, school board members, and teachers: Go home from here and revise your core curriculum. Yes, teach the three Rs; teach the ABCs; make sure your kids learn algebra, biology, and calculus. But teach them about the American Revolution - that it isn't just about white men in powdered wigs carrying muskets in a time long gone. It's about slaves who rose up and women who wouldn't be denied and unwelcome immigrants and exploited workers who against great odds claimed the revolution as their own and breathed life into it.

Teach your kids they don't have to accept what they have been handed. Teach them they are not only equal citizens under the law, but equal sons and daughters - heirs, everyone - of that revolution, and that it is their right to claim it as their own. Teach them to shake the torpor that has been prescribed for them by calculating elders and ideologues. Teach them there is only one force strong enough to counter the power of organized money today, and that is the power of organized people. They are waiting for this message; the kids in your schools have been made to feel as victims, powerless, ashamed, inferior, and disenfranchised. Tell them it's a great big lie - despite their poverty, circumstance, and the long odds they've been handed, they have the power to make the world over again, in their image.

I was at the Presidio in San Francisco yesterday. That former military enclave beneath the Golden Gate Bridge is now a marvelous and beautiful center of vital commerce and civic purpose - saved from exploitation and despoliation by citizens who rose up on its behalf. On the wall of one of the main buildings I came upon a painting of an enormous deep blue wave with white caps against an equally blue sky. The artist's inscription beneath the painting reads: "This human wave expresses the concept of people at the bottom rungs of society waking up to using their united strength to claim their universal rights to economic, social, and environmental justice."

Put that in your core curriculum. It's America 101.

Bill Moyers