I tend to be distrustful of propaganda packaged as education, so naturally my attention was aroused when I read (in a piece titled "After the trigger is pulled") a Philadelphia schoolteacher's comparison of street crime to the Holocaust:

Tuesday, March 14 - In a lecture room at Temple University Hospital, a color slide flashes on the screen: It's a close-up of a throat slashed open, the windpipe still visible in the bloody scene.

Cynthia Vega, 13, whose eighth-grade class is studying violence and writing about it in diaries, looks down and begins to cry and rock in her seat.

"You OK, baby?" asks Temple staffer Scott Charles.

Cynthia nods but does not look up. She is thinking of her 20-year-old cousin, shot in the neck two months earlier. He can barely speak now.

A classmate turns around in his seat and hands her a tissue.

Charles continues: "I don't care how many memorials you get, how many spray-painted murals they put in your name, this can't really be worth it, can it?"

Less than two weeks after sharing poignant diary entries about their absent fathers, the "Freedom Writers" of Grover Washington Jr. Middle School are seeing the blood-and-guts aftermath of violence.

"I wanted them to get a better perspective on the finality - or the desperate reality - that occurs when things turn from a little conflict into guns so quickly," explained their eighth-grade teacher, Michael Galbraith.

He also planned to have them meet a genocide survivor from Sudan and read about the Holocaust.

Not that a connection might not be made between guns and Sudan, or guns and the Holocaust. However I'm just a little too cynical to believe that Nazi gun control or the Warsaw Ghetto are going to be prominent topics. And while I could be wrong about this, I also doubt that the lessons on Sudan will point out that gun control was genocide's best friend, or that the right to bear arms could have saved the Darfur victims.

Galbraith's guns>Sudan>Holocaust technique reminds me of the Michael Moore Bush-plays-golf-Iraqi-children-die method.

No doubt it's "empowering" -- at least for somebody.

But is it teaching?

Considering that the apparent use of taxpayer's money, I'd like to see both sides presented to the kids.