Educational Leadership’s Missing Word

“Come together, right now, or else,

be torn apart.”

Find out what “Remember the Titans” should teach us by watching our Truth in Two (full text below).

 

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Picture Credit: Luke Renoe, Snappy Goat, By impawards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9969828

FULL TEXT

Based on a true story, Denzel Washington plays the part of a black football coach in a white community in the movie Remember the Titans. The coach’s team is half black and half white. And the players hate each other. Trying everything he can to bring his team together, he finally decides to take the young men on a run – at three in the morning. Made to traverse rough terrain for hours, the high school boys find themselves at the Civil War’s bloody battle ground of Gettysburg. Thousands of men from the Confederate and Union armies lost their lives there. In Denzel’s words,

“Take a lesson from the dead. If we don’t come together, right now, on this hallowed ground, we too will be destroyed. Just like they were. I don’t care if you don’t like each other right now, but you will respect each other. And maybe, just maybe, we will learn to play the game of football like men.”

Remember the Titans has much to teach the educational establishment today which tends to focus on three words: diversity, equity and inclusion. But Remember the Titans explains you can’t have those three words without this word: Unity. We hear much in our culture about partisanship, division, war, and a country being torn apart; but very little about “unity.” Nationally, we could do no better than to repeat a famous line from Martin Luther King I Have a Dream that

“little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers”

So maybe we should start preaching one word: “unity.” Focus more on what brings us together than what tears us apart. Take a lesson from MLK and Remember the Titans: come together, right now. For Truth in Two, this is Dr. Mark Eckel, President of the Comenius Institute, personally dedicated to racial unity.