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Excerpts from Living Values Activities Books and
Tolerance Ideas at Home for Parents  of
 

• Tolerance is mutual respect through mutual understanding.
• Peace is the goal; tolerance is the method.
• Tolerance has been called an essential factor for world peace. What is the relationship between world peace and tolerance?
• In the world today there are instances of a relationship between war and extreme intolerance. What are current instances of this, or instances you can think of in history?

Start with a situation from the examples you generated. Explore the factors that led to that particular conflict. After listing these, discuss:

• What have been the consequences of this conflict?
• What are the material costs?
• What are the human costs?
• Is there a relationship between personal peace and tolerance? What do you think that might be?

Discuss the following Tolerance Reflection Points:

• The seeds of intolerance are fear and ignorance.
• The seed of tolerance is love; its water is compassion and care.

 
Read the following story:

A Bowl of Stock

This is a story that is said to describe an event that actually occurred, in a self-service restaurant in Switzerland. 

An elderly lady, about 75 years old, took a bowl and asked the waiter to fill it with stock. She then sat down in one of the many tables in the self-service restaurant. She had hardly sat down when she realized she had forgotten her bread. So she stood up, took a bun to eat with her stock, and returned to sit down.

Surprise! Before the bowl of stock she found a black man calmly eating. "That's the last straw!" thought the lady, "but I am not going to let myself be robbed of my soup." She sat herself down by the black man, divided the bun into pieces, put them into the bowl in front of the black man and put her own spoon into the bowl.

The black man, obliging, smiled. Each one had a spoonful until they finished the soup in silence. Once the soup was finished, the black man stood up, approached the bar and a little later came back with a large dish of spaghetti and . . . two forks. They both ate from the same dish, in silence, taking turns. At the end, the man left. "See you." The lady said as he left. "See you." answered the man, with a smile in his eyes. He seemed satisfied for having done a good action, and went out of the door.

The lady followed him with her eyes. As her surprise diminished, she reached back with her hand for her purse which she had left on the back of a chair. But, to her astonishment, the bag had disappeared. Then she thought, "that black . . ." She was about to call out: "Stop that thief!" when her eye caught her bag hanging from a chair two tables behind where she sat. On the table there was a tray with a bowl of stock, already cold . . .

She realized immediately what had happened. It was not the African man who ate her soup. It was she who was at the wrong table - and she, the grand lady, who had eaten at the expense of the African.

Discuss the story; what assumptions did you have in the middle of the story? Did these assumptions change as the story evolved? Who demonstrated real tolerance in the story?

Watch the news or find articles about examples of tolerance and intolerance in the newspapers in the next few weeks. Keep your eyes open for symbols, pictures, songs, stories and poems that evoke tolerance.


Walking in Your Moccasins

Discuss the Reflection Points:

• Tolerance is mutual respect and mutual understanding.
• Tolerance is being open and receptive to the beauty of differences.

Activity:
Pair up with someone you do not normally work with, and decide who is going to be "A" and "B".

This is a silent exercise to discover what it is like to pretend to be someone else. The As are going to go for a walk for ten minutes. (The As keep time.) The Bs are going to follow them and copy everything they do: from the length, speed and rhythm of their stride and the way they place their feet, to the way they hold their hands and swing their arms. They are to look at and listen to whatever the As look at and listen to. In other words, B is going to spend ten minutes discovering what it is like to be A.

After ten minutes they can stop and talk, and B can tell A what she or he discovered - what changed when pretending to be A. Then reverse roles and repeat the above.
 
What did you discover?


Tolerating Difficulties

Another definition of the word tolerance is "the act or capacity of enduring; endurance; my tolerance of noise is limited." (Random House College Dictionary)

The Reflection Points for this kind of tolerance are:

• Tolerance is also an ability to face difficult situations.
• To tolerate life's inconveniences is to let go, be light, make others light and move on.

In this form, tolerance is facing difficult situations by seeing them from a different perspective: as mole hills, not mountains. Adopting that perspective, of course, would depend on the nature of the situations. Sometimes what appears as a formidable challenge - "a mountain" - may, in retrospect, have only been "a molehill." It's a matter of seeing the circumstance in the overall scheme of things.

Share "self-talk" or methods that help us face or accommodate difficulties.