The War Between the Classes

Amy is a Japanese-American student whose boyfriend is Adam. One of their teachers at school has his class divided into artificial groups based on economics and sex. The students are broken up into Blues (rich, powerful), Dark Greens, Light Greens and Oranges (the bottom of the barrel), and each group is subdivided into two groups based on gender, with the girls being given the highest status in each group.

In addition, there is a very wide range of rules they are to follow including bowing to your "superiors," not talking to people outside of your armband's color, etc. The lesson is also scheduled to run for four weeks. There is even a group of students who are designated to spy on the others and can take names and place fines against the students for disobeying the rules, even off the school's campus.

Amy already has difficulty in her life since her dating of a white boy is not looked upon with favor by her parents who want her to stay within her own race when dating.

The lesson has different effects on different students and is taken very seriously by most of them. The purpose, of course, is to teach about discrimination in its various forms and how it can affect people.

Considering only that part, the book is quite effective is showing about the many negative effects of discrimination, although I am wondering somewhat if this book is sort of "preaching to the choir." Basically, I think most of the people who would buy the book are already aware of the various forms of discrimination, and I think that people who are into discriminating against others aren't the kind of people that would buy the book in the first place.

This is also an old book, copyright 1985. I doubt very much that any teacher in today's world would be allowed to spend so much time on one topic; there is too much pressure to prepare students for standardized tests for most teachers to spend very long on any particular topic. I also think in today's litigious world, such an effort by a teacher would probably be met by various calls from "concerned" parents threatening to sue if the project isn't stopped or modified.

I know of one science teacher, for example, who tried to teach science in a way that the students could relate it to their daily world. For example, when talking about animals one of the things he had students do was list animals in their daily lives, including pets, but also animals on cereal boxes, sports teams named after animals, etc. He did a lot of things like that but eventually ran into severe trouble from the department chairman and was even threatened with being fired.

So I think this book is rather dated, although I do give it credit for at least trying to deal with issue of discrimination.

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