Lessons Learned From the Past

Ms. Hoffman has had a wonderful time in her travels. She has seen some amazing things and beautiful places. She has also tried to learn a lot about the places that she has visited. Learning about the history of a place is really important to understand the place. Unfortunately, one thing she has learned is that a lot of places have some sad things in their history.

Ms. Hoffman visited South Africa first. She learned a lot about apartheid. Apartheid was the government's law during the late 1900s. Do you see a word that you know in apartheid? 

If you said the word "apart," then you are right. Apartheid was a series of laws that were designed to keep people apart. The government believed that people with different skin colors should be kept apart. They made a lot of rules to keep white people and black people apart from each other. The worst part of this was the the white people believed that they were better than the black people and treated the black people very badly. Black people were not allowed to live in the cities, they were not allowed to own land, and they had to carry a pass all the time in order to not be arrested by the police. 

Then Ms. Hoffman visited the Czech Republic in Europe. There were many beautiful old buildings here and a lot of history to learn. One of the things she learned in the history was how Czech people (who were mostly Christian religion) treated people who were of the Jewish religion quite badly. Jews had to live apart from the rest of the people and were not given the same rights as others. 

Ms. Hoffman started to think about how sad she was to hear that so many places in the world had history of treating groups of people badly. But then she started thinking about how important it was that she learned about these bad things. What can we learn from studying some of these bad parts of history? Do you agree with Ms. Hoffman that it is important to learn these things even if they make us sad? Why or why not?