Two weeks ago, in my American Studies (AP English and Honors US History and arguably one of the best courses junior year has to offer) class, my classmates and I were presented with a project unlike anything we had been asked to do before. We knew that we had just wrapped up American policy from 1800-1828 and that the next unit would most likely be slavery. We were right in that regard, but the assessment entailed more than we could have imagined. We had one prompt: “What are the economic, social, and political conditions necessary for the institution of slavery to exist?” Beyond that we weren’t given much else besides comments like “do whatever you want” from our English teacher, Mr. Sohn and “throw some media in there” from the slightly less vague Mr. Carney.  So, along with two classmates, I embarked on a project which I could have never imagined attempting two years ago when I first arrived at Thacher.

While we typically associate slavery with say, the people that built Egypt’s pyramids, or most likely the American South and transatlantic slave trade, we learned that modern slavery is still very much alive: in fact, by some estimates, there are more people enslaved today than 200 years ago. We decided to focus on modern slavery, specifically sex slavery spanning three towns from India, to Thailand, and finally to the US.  The industry of sex slavery is exponentially profitable– 32 billion dollars are earned yearly by the human trafficking industry. One of the things that stuck out to us was how unaware we were about these staggering statistics, and how hard it would be to present a culminating project worth the majority of our grade without understanding it. We figured the best way to not only be successful in this venture but also efficiently educate ourselves was to “teach” others about.  Out of this came the idea of “teaching a town” in which we decided to conduct street interviews in Ojai, talk to Thacher students (ranging from the freshman boys of Lower School to the junior and senior girls of the Hill), and hold discussions at neighboring high schools about the issue.  This would culminate in a website featuring videos about our respective towns of study.

We are halfway done with our project are super excited to be coming up with new ideas every day.  We have a Twitter (https://twitter.com/teachingatown) to keep friends, family members, and classmates updated and a WordPress (https://teachingatown.wordpress.com/) which will document our final result.  Only at Thacher could we be given an opend ended prompt and end up with a street initiative and activism campaign regarding a global epidemic.  Good things are to come.

 

For now,

 

Reade