Perhaps it isn’t quite a case of dé·jà vu but a repeat a continuing issue in a slightly different form. Yesterday’s post had an article about ‘white privilege’ indoctrination in the St Paul (MN) Schools. Funds had been diverted to pay a California group to the detriment of other needs. Finally, teachers began to rebell. The story was a Drudge headliner yesterday. PJ Media continued with the story today.
Black children are being done a grave disservice. All the racial bigotry they are being deluged with serves no purpose other than to force them to remain in dependency. Actual educational benefits are being sacrificed, purposely perhaps, to further political agendas. As usual, the students are caught in the middle.
The purpose of education is to teach the students how to teach themselves. These children spend ten to twelve years in school and the rest of their lives out-of-school. When school systems no longer provide the necessary skills for students to grow and be productive, the children, students, graduates must acquire those skills alone. They must teach themselves. No one else will.
There is another column on black education today. It, like yesterday’s, does not paint a promising picture for black students.
The War against Black Children
By Bruce Deitrick Price, June 3, 2015
There is a statistic out there that almost half the adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate. They can’t fill out job applications. They can’t read the instructions on a pill bottle.
So when we talk about a war against black children, let’s not think first about guns. Think about the weapon that is doing the most damage. That would be our public schools.
You cannot have functionality illiterate children at the high school level unless the school system systematically evades teaching those children to read at the elementary school level. That’s exactly what is happening in cities across America. This is hardly a natural phenomenon. It’s caused by the perennial incompetence (some would say malevolence) of our Education Establishment.
A famous book precisely explained in 1955 “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” You need phonics to teach reading. Without phonics, you will get illiterate kids. But our Education Establishment pretends not to hear the news. Nobody can be that clueless. They are best understood as a cult that pretends to be oblivious if that will help their agenda.
This is an easy matter for everyone to check. Just ask any black parents you know who have (or had) children in elementary school. Go ahead, ask them. That’s the only way we are going to confront and cure this thing. Here’s the key question: Did your children bring home lists of sight-words to be memorized? If that was the method of instruction, then those kids were doomed from the start never to become good readers. Sight-word lists are the smoking gun, the DNA evidence, the bloody fingerprints proving that the people in charge are not serious about literacy.
Our Education Establishment, in its devotion to a progressive (i.e., leveling) ideology, will apparently stop at nothing to make sure children end up with a mediocre education generally and poor reading skills in particular. This shabby education falls with particular violence on children from poor families, single-parent families, and generally families that are not well-educated or highly literate. After all, who will visit the school to defend the child against educational malpractice, which is what most reading instruction is?
So imagine a single mom maybe 25 or 30 years old – no husband, no job, no particular skills, and this mother was herself a victim of bad elementary school education 15 or 20 years before. She probably cannot read at a high level and isn’t comfortable talking about it. Most illiterates never recover from that hopeless feeling of inadequacy due to not learning to read.