Trapped, Thwarted, and Taunted

Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell are both writing about education, and they ask some rather pointed ethical questions of the leftist educational establishment.

Williams first:

The shame of the nation is that poor black children are trapped in terrible schools. But worse than that is that white liberals, black politicians and civil rights leaders, perhaps unwittingly, have taken steps to ensure that black children remain trapped. [Thomas] Sowell says, "Of all the cynical frauds of the Obama administration, few are so despicable as sacrificing the education of poor and minority children to the interests of the teachers' unions." Attorney General Eric Holder's hostility, along with that of the teachers unions, toward the spread of charter schools is just one of the signs of that cynicism. Holder's threats against schools that discipline more black students than he thinks they should add official support to a hostile learning environment.

Sowell further notes that this establishment particularly harms the best students:

Those black spokesmen who see all issues through a racial prism see the proposed change [of Washington, D.C.'s Dunbar High School to a magnet school] as a way to accommodate whites who want to send their children to a public school that keeps out many ghetto blacks. But the issue of selectivity was controversial even when Dunbar was an all-black school.

With or without racial issues, there is no way to provide a good education for youngsters who want to learn when there are less able and more disruptive kids in the same classes. Are those who came to learn going to be sacrificed until such indefinite time as it takes for us to "solve" the "problems" of those who don't?

Incredibly, this isn't the half of it. In a column aptly titled, "Moral Bankruptcy", Sowell notes what these "educators" are doing -- actively fostering envy -- instead of helping their charges acquire the knowledge and thinking skills they will need later in life:

What earthly good did that do for these young people? Thank heaven no one was calloused enough to take me on a tour of a posh private school when I was growing up in Harlem.

No doubt those adults who believe in envy and resentment get their jollies from doing things like this -- and from feeling that they are creating future envy and resentment voters to forward the ideological agenda of the big government left.

But at the expense of kids?

It never ceases to amaze me that, no matter how low my opinion of government schools sinks, it seems that there is always something else even worse lurking around the corner.

-- CAV