SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! Segregating kids by race — even as a class exercise — will only fuel endless racial conflict.

This coming week, 7th and 8th graders at the Lower Manhattan Community School will spend two days immersed in exercises designed to “undo the legacy of racism and oppression in this country that impacts our school community,” as a message to parents reads.

Teaching about America’s troubled past of slavery and segregation is absolutely necessary. But that isn’t what’s happening at this junior high school. Instead, the children are going to be separated and divided into groups along racial lines prior to lessons about how “racial identities influence our experiences.”

African-Americans and Hispanics will be put in one group, while whites, Asians and multi-racial students will each have their own. A fifth group will be provided for those who choose to opt out of what amounts to a racial-selection process.

The ostensible purpose is to increase sensitivity to race. But kids understand that people from various backgrounds have different experiences. After all, the school has a population that is 44 percent Asian, 29 percent white, 15 percent Hispanic and 8 percent black.

Public education in a country committed to racial equality would not, however, seek to reinforce the notion that race is what defines us as individuals. And it would never pressure a diverse group of students to essentially re-enact the shameful racial segregation that was once commonplace in American schools.

I’m so old, I can remember when we judged people by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin, a concept the left appeared to have deliberately forgot.