The Price of a Child: Contemporary Implications

Overview of the Unit

This unit is designed to help students understand the concept of power. This deals with both institutional power as well as how people with less power organize to get more.
(This lesson is adapted from a lesson which appears in Co/Motion: A Guide to Youth Led Social Change published by the Alliance for Justice, New York: 1998)

Procedure

1. Explain that one of the questions raised in the book The Price of a Child is about power – individual power(the acts of conscience of the various individuals in the book), collective power (how people organized to work together to challenge injustice in the book), and institutional power (laws which both enabled enslavement to exist and also challenged enslavement and the institutions which supported them). Explain that they will be looking at this question of power as it applies in the book, and the lessons they can apply to their own lives as students in Philadelphia in 2003.
2. In the middle of the board, write the word POWER. Ask students to do a word association calling out words that they think of that are related to POWER. As each word is called out, “web” it to the word POWER which is written on the board.
3. Tell students take about ten minutes to write out a definition of power that uses some of the words on the board. Then have them meet in small groups of 3 or 4 to come up with a common definition. Have each group present their definition to the class.
4. Use these questions to help students think about the issue of POWER. In the book, The Price of a Child, who had power? How much power did the different characters have? What was the source of their power? How did people confront/question power in the book?
5. Ask students to consider their current situation. Ask them: What do you have power over? How do people/institutions have power over you? What responsibilities come with POWER? (Example: If parents have power over children, what responsibilities do parents have that give them the right to utilize that power?) Other questions to consider might include: When do you have the power to speak? Do people’s voices always have enough power to be heard? The important concepts for students to understand here is “POWER is having access to information, wealth, and resources to either maintain the status quo or to make change.” Have students define what each of the words mean. What kind of wealth, information or resources do they have access to, if any? (Remind students that one thing the powerless have always had at the very least human resources, but it requires organization. Remind them of the movements created by people like Gandhi and King.)
6. Ask students to consider to what ends people choose to use power. Present students with some historical examples of times when people with power oppressed people without power. Make sure that students understand that in all cases, people who had less power did “fight back.” Sometimes they won, and sometimes they didn’t. The point of this discussion is to help students understand that the use of power, the struggle to gain power, the struggle to fight power all run throughout history. (Possible additional examples from American history could include: the fight of indigenous peoples for their lands, the labor movement, resistance to the Japanese American internment, or the suffragette movement, when women gained the right to vote). More current examples could include: the Latino/Hispanic boycott of television to protest the lack of minority characters in prime time TV, or the Chinatown community’s fight against a baseball stadium, or the pressure by people in the City to have the history of enslavement remembered in the new Independence Mall project.
7. Distribute the worksheet on POWER and have students consider the questions on the worksheet either in class as a group discussion or have them choose one or more questions to write about as a journal assignment and then have them discuss their entries in small groups.
8. Distribute the “Power Scenarios Worksheet.” Break students into groups of 4 or 5. Assign each group a scenario. Go through the directions at the top of the page with the students. Then have each group work on their scenario.
9. After students have had a chance to talk about their scenario, have them report back to the class. As a wrap up, have students discuss what they now understand about power. Have them identify what areas they have power over in their own lives and what responsibilities they have as a result of having that power. For homework, have each student write about a time that they can remember when power was used in a bad way. It can be a personal example, or a historical one. Have them write about how people challenged the abuse of power. What helped them to make that challenge? Did they win or lose?

POWER is often enforced by unwritten codes of dress, codes in speech, or even in how buildings are built, or furniture arranged. How do the clothes of the following people reinforce images of power:

• A man in a suit and tie
• A professional wrestler
• A gangsta’ rapper

How is the furniture in most classrooms usually arranged? How does this reinforce images of power?

How does architecture give certain buildings a feeling of power? Think about: government buildings, the train station, a bank.

Resistance

Any time groups of people get together to challenge power, they are met with RESISTANCE. Usually, people who have power do not want to give up power. This means that if you have less power, and you want more, you will have to fight for it. Consider this quote:

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its mighty waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
- Frederick Douglass

Can you think of examples of times when people with less power struggled to get more power? Which struggles were “moral” struggles? Which ones were “physical” struggles? Which were both?

Power Scenarios

For each of the scenarios below, your group should discuss what is fair or not fair about the example. For each example, your group should come up with two possible ways your group can get what you want. Your group should also outline all the pros and cons of each possible action.

1. You are students in a school. Your principle has just made an announcement. Starting next week, all students will now have an immediate five day detention for every minute they arrive late to school. There are to be no excuses whatsoever for late arrival.
2. You are workers in a factory. You must stay on your feet for 8 hours a day. You are only allowed to take one 5 minute break each hour. If you need to use the rest room, you must wait for your assigned break time. Your pay is $5.65 an hour - minimum wage. Some of you have worked in the same factory for over 2 years and you never have gotten a raise. You have no paid vacation time and no benefits (health care, retirement plan, etc.) Last year, the boss of the company announced that the company had made over $1 million profit that year.
3. You are a group of friends who like to meet every week in the local community center. You are all in wheelchairs. The center just had some building work done, and the new entrance now has five stairs to get into the front door. Because you are in wheel chairs, you can no longer use the front door. The center director says you can still use the center, but you either need to bring someone with you to help you get up the stairs, or you need to use another entrance which is at the back of the building. While the bus lets people off right in front of the main entrance, the back entrance is 2 blocks away from the closest bus stop
4. You are a group of friends who all live on the same block. You just found out that the government is planning to put in a trash burning facility on a vacant lot in the next block. They sent out letters to your parents telling them that there should not be any problems in the neighborhood form the trash being brought in, but your parents also got letters from another neighborhood that has a trash burning plant. Those letters say that the plants emit very heavy, obnoxious odors, and since the plant was built in their neighborhood, people have gotten sick and 2 people have developed cancer.