A n old friend of mine (whose friendship I renewed after twenty-five years by finding him on the internet) is developing a educational television program aimed at enhancing children's awareness of historical figures who were of different races. I admire this venture and hope he meets with great success. I strongly agree with his assessment that people of color who contributed to the heritage of our country have been all but left out of the history books that we used throughout our schooling. My daughter had an assignment is school a few years ago that required her to create a large drawing of a historical role model. When I saw the students' work proudly displayed in the school hallways, I couldn't help but notice the obvious lack of African, Asian, or Hispanic faces. Other than George Washington Carver and Harriet Beecher Stowe (who seem to be the token non-white characters in our schools' curricula), which African-Americans do you recall from our history?

As the boomer generation moves through its middle age (sigh...), I wonder how much of our liberal and enlightened conciousness of the world will make it into the psyche of the younger generations. When I cruise around the worldwide web, I can't help but feel that as accessable as it is, and as anonymous as its authors and users are, it is somehow failing to adequately represent the proportion of non-whites in our culture. This is not something I can substantiate; it's just an underlying feeling. You can argue that the net is color-blind, and that there's no need for race to be an issue. However, my concern is that the web is not reaching everyone, and that many children will exhibit signs of this shortcoming in the decades to come. And for those children of color who do browse the web, there appears to be the same scarcity of representation of their culture as there has been in the history books.

When I used a popular search tool to find references to the "American Revolution" combined with "Crispus Attucks", it came up with just over 500 references. When I substituted "Betsy Ross" for Mr. Attucks, the number of references jumped to over 3,000. I won't go into a diatribe on the relative importance to American history of Attucks vs. Ross. I think you can understand the point of my example. Is the web just an extension of the shortcomings of our schooling? Of course, how could it not be? We create using the tools we've been given. My hope is that with similar intentions as my friend's production venture, there will be web developers out there who recognize the potential of this medium to reach out to everyone, and begin to fill in the gaps of our education.

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