People who look through keyholes are apt to get the idea that most things are keyhole shaped. ~Author Unknown

If children are taught only one perspective, they are never truly seeing the world as a whole. When I was in Social Studies class, I only knew one perspective and that was the textbook's. There was no debate or wiggle room in Social Studies. What the book said, is how it was, and my opinion didn't really matter. This didn't really teach me much, other than to strongly dislike Social Studies. If we actually viewed Social Studies from various perspectives and analyzed and evaluated the information, maybe I would have remembered more from class.

Teaching children how to evaluate points of view and biases not only helps them make Social Studies meaningful and memorable, but it also teaches children important life skills. If children are taught how to evaluate perspectives in school, they will learn to investigate and seek out other people's perspectives in real-life situations. They gradually lose their ego-centrism and learn to see the world through wide eyes, rather than a keyhole. This is extremely important in our diverse world today. Children need to know that there are other children with different backgrounds, cultures, and opinions; and peoples' backgrounds will influence their thought process and perspective. There can be multiple points of the view on the same issue, and it is possible that no one point of view is correct or incorrect.

I think that the younger you teach children how to recognize, evaluate, and respond to different perspectives, the more open-minded they will be in life. I believe that you could easily start in the first grade by reading The Real Story of the Three Little Pigs, a children's book told from the wolf's perspective. I only recently learned of the book, but I believe that I would have greatly benefited from reading that story as a child. I never even thought of looking at the story from a different perspective.

I found an awesome article in The Reading Teacher that explains how to teach multiple perspectives by analyzing the views of Rosa Parks and James Blake, the bus driver. It outlines how to scaffold empathy through looking at the situation through a contrasting point of view. From all of the history books and things I have learned, I thought that the bus driver was an outrageous, racist man. But picture him as a family man, with little money, relying on his job as a bus driver to support his family. Now read this from his point of view:

I wasn't trying to do anything to that Rosa Parks woman except my job. She was in violation of the city codes, so what was I supposed to do? I guess that is part of who I am, a person who does his job according to the code of law. Since that day the law has changed, but on that day I was doing my job.

Wow! Perspective!