Solutions to Black Education

Sir;... Perhaps if you were to see your black brothers and sisters schooled in picking cotton and pulling a plow with a lash across their backs you would welcome their teachers cheating on their exams... I will tell you here and now that the problem with white education is the same as with black education in that it teaches the ruling ideology, and denies too much of obvious reality...
Short of correcting the nonsense you teach, you will never have black people accept it... Show them people in their community who have struck it rich working for a living... There must be at least one??? Steal their memories so no sense of injustice suffered by blacks as a community is remembered... Give them hope in a hopeless world, a nice friendly accepting environment free of intimidation and danger, and fill it full of inspiration, excitment, and interesting examples of reality... Stroke them when they are young, afraid, lonely or hurt while mom is off serving some modern master, and let them know they are loved, and valued by their society...Does anyone get that people exposed to 5 hours of school a day, and perhaps 8 hours of television are being fed a diet of fiction only slightly less pervasive than the nonsense they are taught in school... Tell them that television isn't real, and that reality for them is so much worse than television and you have done them a service... Do you think people playing video games get a real good sense of the finality of death, or of the value of morality??? Some one including the whole school system and the economy at large is showing a profit on the ignorance of the black community, but we the people must suffer their antagonism and malevelence... It is like a sack party they suffer with a bag over their heads while they are kicked, hit, and abused by people unseen... Why should they not hate us all... Are we their brothers, and do we seek them out and see if theirs want to go with ours to the zoo or the museum??? We care not, see them not, love them not and fully suffer their ignorance and frustration as our own... Where is the profit in that???
To take black children from their environment is illegal, and to leave them there raised by people as ill used and as ignorant as can be imagined is a crime.... Uneducated black parents without hope, but vested with resentment and envy are not parents but co-conpirators... From our point of view, expecting what we consider problems with black education to resolve themselves by teaching for the test is ridculous...Expecting uneducated parents to hold up their end of a co-operative effort between community and parents to produce educated children is more stupidty...

Thanks...Sweeney

Mr. Williams,
---The private schools do not have to take all students and the students going to such places are from families with parents who invest the effort and expense of getting them in. And such schools can also simply dump their problem students on the government school system. Compare apples to apples, please.
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---"Teachers have families to raise, mortgages, car payments and other financial obligations. Their pay, retention and promotions depend on how well their students perform on standardized tests." Congratulations, you got most of the way there. The item you are missing is that the teachers can do little to fix what is wrong in these students frequently pathological lives and yet, their livelihoods are tied to the assumption that they just have to be better teachers and the test scores will be just like Finland or Singapore. This is a truly perverse incentive system.
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---I used to be in favor of private school vouchers, but one issue has caused me to rethink that position. Government money would not come without strings attached. And the strings would multiply like weeds in the spring. As more than one conservative commentator has pointed out, vouchers would likely allow the government to do to private schools what they have done "for" government schools.

Re: Mark;... Why do people say: government money??? What is government money??? When people say the government as though the government were an abstraction, they betray with their words their alienation from what should be their government, and our government... We all know the government does not work for us or respond to our will... The question is: to whom does it respond; and is that actually working -for enough, a majority of the people??? We may for the most part agree with what the government is trying to do in principal, and disagree with it in particulars... I think that because our so called free government is so well identified with free enterprise it ends up as the whipping boy for a failed economy and economic decisions it did not make, but upon accepted principals, could not contest... Even the word economy means management, and yet our so called economy rejects all management...Because the economy fails this people in order to be a success for a handful of rich, all other social services that we expect from government including defense fails...The linking of the economy with government through out education, the teaching for testing, and the education for employment, the neglect of philosophy and understanding from beginning to end of learning, and the inevitable microscopia and myopia that encourages is a curse on this whole society...There is so little of education and so much of propaganda in our schools that it is a wonder anyone learns anything... And you want to leave the forces of religion, magic and credulity free to preach and teach any economic nonsense no matter how much it destroys this society... Figure it out... Christianity destroys societies and makes them at will...It sympathizes with the crushed, and supports the crushers... The rich want you to believe what they will never, and for that reason resist every expression of reason through government... I will not say government is totally unreasonable, but its reason like the reason of most of us is limited to the attainment of irrational goals... The rich and their religious slaves are not in the least part reasonable...The churches understand that so long as people can be kept ignorant they will survive any sort of revolution or reform... The rich simply resist any knowledge they cannot profit from, and resist all threats to their wealth...
As bad as government is, its failure is not the evil it does, but is the fact that it does so little good...Government has every legitimate power it needs to regulate commerce, even the commercialization of religion, or education; and for ideological consideration it refuses to act... If government did anything substancial, and failed, you might be right to think of it as an alien force, The Government, as opposed to our government... Our government does nothing even while our problems mount and all these institutions fail us...We need more than a cypher, or a place holder in Washington... If the government could not work as constituted, and will not work as it must; then it is time for democracy, for government to defer to the genius of the people, and follow their will...And I am not confusing majority rule with democracy...
Thanks...Sweeney

Thank you, Professor Williams, for establishing some insightful benchmarks for how to how to bring our kids back to school and to the love of learning, how to assist our teachers find fulfillment in their profession, and how we s citizens can feel good about contributing to our world.
I read at least three basic and general points: 1) There was a fine line between respect and fear in our past that parents and children (not only blacks but all people) understood and adhered when it came to education and authority figures; 2) Teachers need not only our help but our respect in their classroom and at home--and that does not necessarily mean more money per se, but rather CHOICE whether that is in the form of a voucher or a parent in the classroom of their child--to ensure student behavior is at least one thing teachers need not worry about; and 3) The education of our children is not something that can be molded or legislated by government from Washington, D.C., rather an obligation of loving-kindness that must be "unfolded" by parents and teachers in our communities.
I would like to add just one giant point: The futility of learning "everything" of importance I believe our students today are overwhelmed with what is called "core curriculum." It's too much, too soon, too fast. Students cannot possibly learn everything of value by the time they leave school, but we can instill in them the desire to keep questioning throughout their lives...the love of learning.
The aim of education is not to eliminate ignorance, rather to replace an empty mind with an "open one." The view that everything of importance can be thoughtfully learned by the 12th grade–-notice I did not say "taught"–-is a delusion. Those who would treat schooling as designed to educate students on all important subjects are doomed to encounter the futility that faced Sisyphus: the boulder of "essential content" can only come thundering down the (growing) hill of knowledge.
Students need to ENJOY the experience of learning...of being students. Soon enough they will learn ALL about being adults--and all they need to know about that.

Re: Rick Martinez;... About your points: If there is a fine line between fear and respect, it is certain many people stepped over it... Our current respect for children as legal individuals is an inevitable point of progress from the legal definition of the individual that began as a legal matter about a thousand years ago in earnest, can be traced to the writing of St. Paul; and to the Roman Law of Nations, the beginning of our Natural Law that for the first time put forward the notion that all nations- not individuals- were equal...The absolute worst thing for a child to know is that they have rights before they learn the necessity of respecting other people's rights... This sense of power is an impediment to education; but so is brutality which teaches only brutality...
A fair wage is an essential sign of respect for teachers... We need to send the message that there is money in education... We say it to children, but the proof, the most obvious proof of a well paid teacher we deny to them...All through the right is the evidence found of a total disrespect of knowledge, and fear, and contempt of science... Global warming is one example with an extreme form found in faith healing... People can get on to computers and run down science; but in the end they find themselves in hospitals begging science to save the lives the have spent running down the intelligent, and dismissing science...The constitution grants this people little democracy because our founders feared the uneducated masses, but without power, the people could not demand education, and without education could not demand power...This was the original Catch 22..

Sir; there is much that government should do and does not do; and equally much it should not do and does...Yes; this country is very good at reaching and educating its most able people, but it is also good about burdening them with excessive debt that makes them slaves to the masters of technology... It does not do a very good job of encouraging innovation, and patent law clearly favors employers over inventers...But no one can argue rationally that government should not KNOW as a practical matter, and have the power to act on that knowledge... Global warming is one example, but environmental issues generally, health issues generally, and anything considered under the heading of General Welfare is properly something Government should consider, learn the facts on, exercise leadership on, and act on...
For the government to give equal time to faith or wishful thinking is pure abdication of responsibility... Look for example at New Orleons and Katrina... This city was a guppy in a blender... Pumps were in disrepair, levis were in bad repair, and the whole city is in a flood and hurricane zone, below the level of the surrounding water much of the time...There is a place for prayers in the face of disaster, but there is a much better argument for finding the facts, and acting upon them; and if that requires money; then money spent at the right time will save lives and property and a lot more money in the long run... We allow faith and hope to hold too many seats in every discussion in government... God helps those who help themselves, and I do not mean: to the cash... People can be elected and re-elected leaving money in the pockets of the rich, or in promising to leave it in the pockets of the middle class as they never do; but look at our roads and bridges... Sure; I can save a hundred bucks on my tax bill by letting the roads go to hell; but one good pothole can cost me thousands... Is it better to pay repair shops or insurance companies when government should do what it must, and spend what it and we need???

Where is the economy in that sense of the word: House-Management... Hoping to God, praying to God, trusting in God to do what rational people form governments to do is purely nonsense... It is not even a false economy... It is the economy of stupidity... It is our ruin... If the only way capitalism can seem to work is for government to close up shop and be useless, then that price is too high...Whatever people want to do in their personal lives is fine with me... If you truly trust in God and do not want to participate in society then keep to yourself, pay for what you use, and quit screwing up government for those who know government is the place for rational people to meet and deal with reality...There is too much undone that cannot be privatized or individualized, and for that reason we have government... Education is just one of those things, and I understand parochial people want their children educated in their own prejudices and biggoty, but to have a nation we must have national education and national standards...Let the churches and parents screw up the minds of the children on their own time...
Thanks...Sweeney

And what is the people's will, Sweeney? Is that your will or my will or Williams' will? Because I assure you they are not all the same and averaging them creates an incoherent mess.