Chapter 1: Awake to prejudice.

A/N: This is my second HP fanfic, my first as madeyemarauder. I don't know why I tried again after the first flop, except that I've even started dreaming about it. This might clear it out of my head.

I freely admit that I didn't, and couldn't write "Harry Potter and the Philosophers' Stone", "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban", "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix", "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince", "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows", "Quidditch through the Ages", "Magical Creatures and where to find them", nor even "The Tales of Beadle the Bard". However, I have read them many, many times, and enjoyed them so much that when the supply ran out I had to fill the gap by reading Harry Potter fan fiction.

When Harry was eight, he had a remarkable teacher. Sally Martin had just graduated from Teachers' College at the top of her class. When she learned that her practical exam was to be supervised by the hardest-marking examiner, she spent every moment – even dreaming about it at night – working out the best possible lesson she could possibly teach.

It became a combination of Ethics, History, Geography, Music and Mathematics. Its purpose was to illustrate the unfairness of discrimination. Although she would not use big words like discrimination in a lesson to Grade Three students, she knew very well by her little brother's reactions that they had a very strong sense of fairness and unfairness.

The lesson began with a description of the treatment given to Negro slaves. Although it is easy now to see how unfair this was, at the time most people took it as the way things were. They had grown up with almost everyone accepting it as normal. It took books like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and Stephen Foster's Negro songs for people to look at it from the other side of the fence, and imagine how it would be to be born as a slave. She played "Ole Man Ribber", "Ole Black Joe" and others, pointing out that the grammar and spelling were due to their being given no schooling, and showing the deep feeling they expressed. Later she played some Negro spirituals, showing their strong faith "in a better life to come" and how they saw escaping north across the Mississippi to be like the deliverance of God's Chosen People, first from Egypt, and forty years later, across the Jordan into Canaan.

The next step was to choose other examples of discrimination, such as the efforts women had to make to get the right to vote, the fact that all women and gay men were refused entry into the army as well as many avenues of employment; wars over differences in religion in Yugoslavia after it was broken up into the former countries which it had swallowed up, the situation in Ireland between the republican and mostly catholic south, and the Loyalist and mostly protestant north...

Then the class were asked to suggest other people who were badly treated because they were different from most others. First mentioned was the Gypsies, then the Kurds, the Hill Tribes between Burma and Thailand, and suspicion in Christian countries that all Muslims were terrorists.

Finally, they were shown how to construct simple Venn diagrams, showing how some groups are excluded while others share their territory. Sally attributed her result mainly to the success of this lesson, and decided that each year, once she knew her class well enough, she would teach it, with any improvements she could make each time.

When his turn came, Harry found it easy to draw a very big circle with the very big Dursleys, and a tiny circle for the freak, only intersecting at the cupboard under the stairs. However, he did not show this to anyone, as he know how THAT would end up...

No other lesson ever meant as much to him. He realised that if he met someone who looked like Uncle Vernon, that did not mean he had to be cruel like him. It also made him think what it was like to be in someone else's shoes, and was sympathetic to anyone who was in any trouble.