Things that made you a liberal
Public schools?
Today I was thinking of a book read to us in the third grade in Maryland. I cannot remember the name of the book or the main character’s name. I have thought about the little girl in the book, and her family, for 51 years. Her parents were sharecroppers. She had to work in the fields alongside them. She had to move a lot. She could not attend school regularly. She loved school and hated missing it. I vividly remember her getting a dress made of sacks. In little girl world, a dress of one’s own is magic-world, so I am not surprised that I remember that.
The girl’s story was “cool,” although it was a few years before that word came into use among children. We were not made to feel sorry for her, but to walk in shoes and experience a bit if her life.
Our teacher, Mrs. Gambrell, was from North Carolina and I got the distinct impression she wanted her mostly Yankee students to know about Southern children.
Was Mrs. Gambrell, beautiful and cultured and a woman if her time, a secret Marxist? Likely not. But the book she read to us imprinted something in us. I never pass a field without thinking of the lives of children and families who work there.
In 8th grade, we read Roots in American history. In Georgia. With an African American teacher.
The repugs are right to fear the public schools, I think.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Then discovering that is where the liberals always are. 
