Seventh-Graders Master A Lesson In Human Rights
When Ron Adams’ seventh-graders set out to raise $100,000 for a human rights project, he braced for a long, hard effort. The Massachusetts teacher expected lots of envelope stuffing and working the telephones, not to mention disappointments.
But his kids’ plans didn’t include a single postage stamp or phone pitch. They were going to tap the Internet.
With a few dozen e-mail messages, the students at Broad Meadows Middle School set in motion a civics lesson that may be unrivaled in on-line activism. To date, they’ve raised $107,000 from donors around the world to build a school for their peers half a world away, in Pakistan.
“Without the Net and this technology, we never would have come close,” Adams says. “That’s amazing to me, but the kids aren’t surprised at all. This is their technology, just one of the tools they have.
“To them, a modem is just a gateway to kids everywhere, and they don’t hesitate to use it.”
The students had extraordinary inspiration: a 12-year-old boy who was murdered for daring to speak the truth.
In 1994, the class received a visit from Iqbal Masih. Their Web page (www.digitalrag.com/mirror/ iqbal.html) sums up Iqbal’s life this way:
“Sold into child bonded labor at 4 years of age for $12. Escaped at age 10 and spoke out against child slavery and for freedom and schools for all Pakistani children. At age 12, Iqbal won the Reebok Human Rights Youth in Action Award 1994. Easter Sunday, 1995, he was murdered.”
Iqbal traveled the world attacking the use of child labor in rug factories. His unsolved murder, widely believed to be an assassination for his activism, stunned and angered the seventh-graders.
Out of that rage came the plan to make a difference. From Iqbal’s comments during his visit, they found their goal: to fund and build a school that Pakistani children could attend for free. As a symbolic gesture, they asked that people donate $12, the same amount Iqbal’s father got for his son.
Their first pleas were 36 e-mail messages sent over Scholastic Net, a bulletin board system linking U.S. schools. The next morning they had 12 partner classes who agreed to take an active role in fund-raising.
Then Amnesty International heard about the effort. The international human rights group offered expertise and equipment to help the kids build a Web page.
Suddenly, Adams found himself immersed in a world and language he didn’t understand. The students were busy writing stories, scanning photos and artwork and learning to code Web pages. In June 1995, their page, A Bullet Can’t Kill a Dream, went on-line.
“You could watch teachers come in here, and their jaws would drop when they saw what the kids had done,” Adams says. “There on the screen was mail from Panama or Saudi Arabia. And the bank account was filling up fast.”
Indeed, the effort pulled in nearly $1,000 a week, from more than 1,600 donors, including the band R.E.M. Money came from every state and a dozen countries.
“These kids used technology to do what schools have been struggling to create for years, a sense of community,” he says. “Only theirs spanned the globe. It’s as if the walls of the classroom melted away.”
In February, the class solicited bids to build the school. In April, it selected an organization to oversee the effort. In December, the contractors plan to break ground. And next April, on the anniversary of his death, Iqbal Masih’s school will open its doors.
The fund-raising effort is officially over, but the students plan to keep the site up to spread the word about child slavery and efforts to fight it. For Adams, it will serve another purpose.
“In my life, it’s been very easy to look upon computers as depersonalizing our world. They were cold, machines that separated people,” he says. “Now I see what they really can do. They connect people at each end of the line.”
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