A small bit of race-realism appears to have penetrated the über-politically correct world of academia. CBS Tampa reports about a State Board of Education plan which sets different goals for math and science depending upon students’ race. Asians have the highest goals, followed closely by Whites and more distantly by Hispanics and Blacks. The racial ranking of these academic goals is consistent with the results of extensive IQ testing in the United States. Naturally enough, race-deniers, equality advocates and ‘community activists’ are moaning about the plan being ‘unfair’:
The plan has infuriated many community activists in Palm Beach County and across the state.
“To expect less from one demographic and more from another is just a little off-base,” Juan Lopez, magnet coordinator at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Riviera Beach, told the Palm Beach Post.
JFK Middle has a black student population of about 88 percent.
“Our kids, although they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they still have the ability to learn,” Lopez said. “To dumb down the expectations for one group, that seems a little unfair.”
So far though, despite the predictable criticism, the Florida State Government is sticking with its plan:
[T]he Florida Department of Education said the goals recognize that not every group is starting from the same point and are meant to be ambitious but realistic.
There are so many things that can be said about this and how we got to this point…most of the readers here already know which is why I won’t re-hash them. That being said, I remember Walter E. Williams saying many times that as a black kid in the inner-city, they had crappy text books, less than ideal environmental classroom (hot in the warm months, cold in the winter months)conditions, but they learned. And if they didn’t do good in school, guess who broke out the switch at home? DAD! They may have had poverty, but the one thing they didn’t suffer was a normal nuclear family and a resolve to learn regardless of conditions. Nowadays, prisoners have better conditions and they’re dumber than a box of rocks. The federal education programmes are required to teach to the lowest common denominator….and they’re still failing!
“Our kids, although they come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, they still have the ability to learn,” Lopez said. “To dumb down the expectations for one group, that seems a little unfair.”
I teach in the inner city, and sometimes I have to ask myself, the ability to learn what? They want us to encourage critical thinking, but most of these kids cannot repeat back what you say to them, much less tell you what it means or take it to a higher level. Many are downright hostile to learning. They gripe about reading a 2 page article. I asked an Econ class to calculate 5% of $10,000 and many could not do it.
Here’s something to think about. Fifty years ago, or one hundred, or more, most people did some type of manual labor. Many weren’t very educated (i.e., they didn’t receive much schooling) because they didn’t need it. Now that our agriculture is highly mechanized and many of our manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, there is little left for which these individuals are qualified. However, people did not just become more intelligent or more educable just because the jobs for which they would naturally have been fit went away.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the American education establishment is hellbent on forcing everyone to go to college. College is not for everyone. Yet, when they don’t teach kids that there are other options (such as trade school), and when kids know that they are not college material, they give up. They quit trying, become hostile, create disruptions, and often drop out. Kids who want to learn are deprived of the opportunity because so much time, effort, and money is spent on remediation and behavior issues. The bright kids are the ones we should be spending money on, not the idiots who don’t want to learn. But, instead we let the smart kids fall by the wayside, and that hurts us all.
Amy, you are 100% right. This is the ultimate folly of the “equality” battle cry. All men are *not* created equal. There is one thing, and one thing only in which we are all equal: God’s love for us. In all other ways we are unequal. And this is not a bad thing. It is not shameful to be suited for manual labour. It is shameful to tell a person that manual labour is demeaning, and he should strive for something better, and then when he doesn’t succeed at anything better, to let him believe he is a failure because of it.