If anyone was hoping that the WaPo editorial page would get more respectable with the advent of Jeff Bezos, this article is bound to prove a disappointment. Andre Perry argues that it is an important function of the public schools, at least on a par with the task of educating children, to provide jobs to disadvantaged teachers. Thus, movements to limit teacher tenure are a stab in the heart of black professionals.
This argument has always seemed implicit in the attitudes of many progressives, but I believe this is the first time I've seen it made openly.
A target list is needed.
ReplyDeleteClose to that sentiment is this one, reported by Theodore Dalrymple in "Lost in the Ghetto":
ReplyDelete"Many of my intelligent patients from the slums recount how, in school, they expressed a desire to learn, only to suffer mockery, excommunication, and in some instances outright violence from their peers...
"Teachers rarely protect such children or encourage them to resist absorption into the culture that will all too clearly imprison them in the social condition into which they were born...I have heard two teachers expound the theory that, as social mobility reinforces the existing social structure, it delays the achievement of social justice by depriving the lower classes of militants and potential leaders. Thus to encourage an individual child to escape his heritage of continual soap opera and pop music, tabloid newspapers, poverty, squalor, and domestic violence is, in the eyes of many teachers, to encourage class treachery. It also conveniently absolves teachers of the tedious responsibility for the welfare of individual pupils."
It's about "class" rather than "race" solidarity but it amounts to the same thing...solidarity first, education second or maybe never.
Golly Gee Whiz, couldn't Amazon hire some of those "disadvantaged teachers?" After all, wouldn't Jeff Bezos want to show how public spirited Amazon is?
ReplyDeleteRe Joseph W's quoting of Dalrymple :For the most part, Dalrymple is writing about the WHITE underclass in Great Britain. Which is why he talks about "class" solidarity.
If Andre Perry thinks that mothers will sacrifice their childs education on the altar of teacher tenure, he is sadly mistaken.
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