Friday, January 06, 2006

SOME CONSTRUCTIVE IDEAS FOR BLACK EDUCATION

Yes, various nonwhite immigrant groups continue to find a place in American society and to do well, but there remains, in more than a few instances, a wide gap--in income and cultural identity--between America's white and black citizens. Indeed, the U.S. is the only prosperous democracy to have a large, racially distinct underclass where unemployment, criminality and fatherless families are too often the norm.

Why this is so and what we are to do about it is the principal theme of John McWhorter's splendid "Winning the Race." In particular, Mr. McWhorter examines why the optimism that defined the years of the civil-rights movement has been replaced by defeatism and alienation in the black community--even as America's racial attitudes and policies have changed so dramatically for the better.

Mr. McWhorter's answers are anything but orthodox, and little wonder: He is routinely classified--and, in certain circles, dismissed--as a "black conservative." But his views are not easily labeled. He advocates some drug decriminalization, for instance, and favors affirmative action for those in economic need (but not for middle-class children or the children of immigrants). He didn't even vote for George W. Bush. Still, he argues compellingly that the widely accepted ideas that try to explain the persistence of racial inequality--leftist views, for the most part--stand in the way of black progress.

Like others, Mr. McWhorter blames open-ended welfare and the fashions of the white counterculture--especially its glorification of drug use--for damaging precisely the generation of blacks that should have reaped the benefits of civil-rights change. But he also blames an academic establishment and intellectual elite that seem unwilling to judge the dynamics of black life by the standards that it applies to other groups.

A former professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley (he is now a fellow at the Manhattan Institute), Mr. McWhorter has a keen eye for the foibles of social scientists--that is, for the way they maneuver their methodology to find the big idea (the "golden key") that will explain black poverty. He inspects each big idea in turn--deindustrialization, housing segregation, slum clearance, drug supply, high-rise public housing--and finds it less than compelling. Indeed, he finds that such big ideas only help to induce a sense of impotence that impedes black America's rise from poverty.

Thus he counsels against "the plangent image of young black men 'spatially mismatched' from factories that move away." To accept such an image as an explanation "is to agree that the only humans in history incapable of adapting to changing employment conditions were descendants of African slaves in the United States." Of those who blame ghetto life on the flight of middle-class blacks to the suburbs, he asks: "What other group of poor people besides black Americans has been depicted as going to hell because middle-class ones were not around?" Many scholars, he notes, suggest that "there is something sinister and small about the millions of us who moved away from the ghetto." But their logic suggests, in turn, "a kind of permanent racial balkanization." He is impatient with those who contend that the crack epidemic is responsible for the black community's plight, as if "poor blacks are so vulnerable, so devoid of any human agency, that all one has to do is wave a crack pipe in front of them and about every second one of them will leap at it like a dog grabbing a pork chop."

And then there is hip-hop. Mr. McWhorter is clearly familiar with the whole hip-hop scene and even values some of its music. But he insists that, on the whole, hip-hop, or rap, neither conveys the reality of ghetto life nor points young blacks in the right direction. Meanwhile, intellectual apologists "tie themselves up in knots trying to criticize and yet excuse rap's sexism in the same sentence." The plain fact is that rap is "the most overtly and consistently misogynistic music ever produced in human history."

Clearly Mr. McWhorter is concerned less with public policy than with black America's psychological readiness to join the competitive mainstream. Like welfare, he argues, the outlook of the underclass requires reform. But such reform will not occur as long as a set of corrosive beliefs holds sway advising blacks that the system is rigged against them and encouraging in them "therapeutic alienation"--an exaggerated sense of victimhood. There is consolation in such beliefs, Mr. McWhorter concedes, but they are no way to win the race.


More here




Pre-school: The usual Leftist policy of the bludgeon

Parents should be forced to send their children to pre-school or face the loss of their family tax benefit payments, according to Labor MP Craig Emerson. Family payments were meant to compensate parents for the extra costs of raising children, the federal Labor backbencher said yesterday, but the money was being handed out to families with no obligation to spend it on the children.

"It is now generally accepted that early childhood development is crucial in determining the life chances of young people," he told The Australian. "Access to a pre-school education is vital in ensuring children are ready to learn from day one at school." It made no sense that some payments carried obligations while others did not, Dr Emerson said. The federal Government had so far tackled only reciprocal arrangements for Aborigines, parents on unemployment benefits and those getting single-parent payments. "Why should black and white families in urban areas be excused from any reciprocal obligation?" he said. "Family payments are passive welfare. If you have dependent children you receive family payments directly into your bank account, no questions asked."

The comments follow demands by Liberal backbenchers who claim some state-run pre-schools are so poor parents are opting for long daycare instead. But the backbenchers say long daycare fails to provide children with the basic literacy skills needed for primary school.

Dr Emerson's plan is controversial because politicians from both sides of politics have treated family tax benefit payments as obligation-free handouts from the federal Government. But Dr Emerson said it was odd mutual obligation did not apply to family payments. "It's a large area of payment - it's $14billion that's spent on family payments, essentially no questions asked." Under his scheme, pre-schools would be available for all children so parents could fulfil their side of the bargain. He said parents whose children were regularly absent from school should be interviewed by Centrelink and threatened with having payments withheld. Dr Emerson said his plan was different to the Government's mutual obligation schemes - which have so far targeted only Aboriginal families - because parents would be offered support, not just punishment. "Commonwealth and state support staff would be made available to assist with transport, remedial learning, positive parenting and counselling," he said. [More bureaucracy! Hooray!] "Opponents of proposals like this argue for the rights of the parents," he said. "But parents do not have the right to neglect and abuse their children. Defenceless children have rights, and we must protect them."

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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