News & Events
Parlin Students Learn Hard Lessons
Spring 2007
Like certain aspects of our life, some school lessons are not always pleasant. Students at New Road School of Parlin recently came face to face with such lessons when Dr. Paul Winkler of the New Jersey Commission on Holocaust Education exposed the students to the realities of bias, bigotry and prejudice.
Through the use of stories, books, poems, anecdotes and simulations Dr. Winkler exposed New Roaders of all ages to the real life experience of bullying, acceptance of others and the appreciation of differences. For older children, using the story of Anne Frank as a backdrop, he emphasized the importance and role that just one person can make when one chooses to stand up against social injustices.
One of the most moving parts of the program came when Dr. Winkler read the book “The
Yellow Star” by Carmen Deedy. This is the legend of Denmark’s King Christian X who, after the Nazis had conquered his country and forced every Jew to sew a yellow star on his/her jacket, King Christian stood up against prejudice and bias and he too sewed a yellow star on his coat and wore it each morning as he went out walking.
By the end of Dr. Winkler’s lesson, New Road students better understood that to remember incidents of bias, prejudice and cruelty to others “is continuing the resistance.”
