The conventional wisdom of the Obama Era appears to be that the solution to black underachievement is that we should take poor black children away from their mothers for as long as possible each day and turn them over to nice white people with liberal arts degrees for almost their entire waking hours.
Assuming that this isn't just a make-work program for nice white ladies with unmarketable soft degrees, hasn't anybody noticed that this is pretty much the same idea that motivated the Australian government in the 1920s and 1930s to take half-white / half-Aboriginal children away from their (frequently alcoholic) Aboriginal mothers and send them to taxpayer-supported boarding schools?
This practice is now denounced as "The Stolen Generation," and the Australian government recently engaged in an orgy of self-congratulation over apologizing for it.
Why is everybody so sure that taking black children away from their mothers and grandmothers will work out better in 21st Century America than it did in 20th Century Australia?
Assuming that this isn't just a make-work program for nice white ladies with unmarketable soft degrees, hasn't anybody noticed that this is pretty much the same idea that motivated the Australian government in the 1920s and 1930s to take half-white / half-Aboriginal children away from their (frequently alcoholic) Aboriginal mothers and send them to taxpayer-supported boarding schools?
This practice is now denounced as "The Stolen Generation," and the Australian government recently engaged in an orgy of self-congratulation over apologizing for it.
Why is everybody so sure that taking black children away from their mothers and grandmothers will work out better in 21st Century America than it did in 20th Century Australia?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Posts
65 comments:
Steve,
the Aussie historian Keith Windschuttle has a different account account of the 'stolen generation'.
Richard...London
A fine apercu, Mr iSteve.
Steve, maybe stealing a generation of aborigines was a better option than the media generally will admit:
"ELDERS from a far north Queensland community are calling for the removal of children in the face of a comprehensive breakdown of social standards.
Several members of Aurukun's community justice group, led by Martha Koowarta, widow of a local land rights hero, are urging outsiders to take children from age nine for their safety and education.
Justice, education and child safety standards in Aurukun, Cape York, have collapsed. Last financial year, 763 defendants — including repeat offenders — from the township of 1000, faced court.
"We need to get the children out of here, especially the girls, because it is not safe," Ms Koowarta said. "Closing the school (in favour of boarding schools) is a good idea, so that when they come back from the city, they can talk and read English as well as Wik Mungkan.
"I was put in a mission dormitory when I was eight, nine. I cried for two nights, then I was right with the rest of those kids. We weren't stolen; our family was there. It was a good system. Or a better system than now. At least my generation learnt to read and write properly.""
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/remove-children-plea-at-aurukun/2008/03/13/1205126111240.html
"this is pretty much the same idea that motivated the Australian government in the 1920s and 1930s to take half-white / half-Aboriginal children away from their (frequently alcoholic) Aboriginal mothers and send them to taxpayer-supported boarding schools?"
It looks as if there is no 'solution' to the problem of Australian Aborigines of the kind that people used-to hope for; but it may also be the case that some answers are somewhat better than others:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB123214753161791813-lMyQjAxMDI5MzEyNzExNDc3Wj.html
However, despite the dreadful social pathologies, and much shorter life expectancy, the population of Aborigines is growing rapidly according to official sources:
"Australia's Indigenous population is projected to increase from 458,500 people in 2001 to 528,600 people in 2009"
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/bb8db737e2af84b8ca2571780015701e/68AE74ED632E17A6CA2573D200110075?
opendocument
I've always thought that the real motivation behind "Universal Preschool" was to try to take away the stigma of day-care by rebranding it as "educational".
You can get rid of your kids for the entire day and not feel guilty about it because it will be "good for them."
"Why is everybody so sure that taking black children away from their mothers and grandmothers will work out better in 21st Century America than it did in 20th Century Australia?"
Hope and change?
Steve, the choice we face is not between warehouse-style daycare or well-funded preschools. It is instead between prosperity and decline, security and danger, reward and risk, flowers and thistles, good and evil.
Hmm, good point. I guess the answers are: (1) It'll be sort-of voluntary and (2) "WE are NICE people, not like those evil racists of pre-60s Australia et al, and WE know best".
From what I recall from The Bell Curve et al, the main environmental predictor of achievement for boys and girls is having your biological father living at home with you and your mother. For boys it's a general rule; for girls it's most important ca age 14. I guess male father-figure teachers might help a bit.
BTW, did the Australian policy work out badly? My impression is that the 'stolen generation' ended up well educated, confident, and as 'Aboriginal rights' community leaders, engaged in extracting the maximum danegeld from the Australian government. I doubt the current plans will be so successful.
"The conventional wisdom of the Obama Era appears to be that the solution to black underachievement is that we should take poor black children away from their mothers for as long as possible each day and turn them over to nice white people with liberal arts degrees for almost their entire waking hours."
We tried that for a few generations in Canada, didn't work out so well. So, who wants to start a pool on the size of the class action suit that you just know is coming? I'll take, oh, 11 trillion dollars. Reparations by another name, you read it here first.
Typed the above before reading the whole post, I see the Aussies did it too, have they had to fork out $4 billion in reparations?
Oh, and the panel's name which decided how much money each Indian received? The Truth and Reconciliation Commission; might as well have held the hearings on Robbin Island FFS. The worse story you told the more money you got. Crime rate has shot up in accordance.
Did it NOT work in Australia?
Mmm, well, the kids get to be at home every night, and have their mothers, at this tender age. But obviously you know that so, your point was that the Australian project failed to integrate the kids, even with this more extreme tactic? But, wasn't the aim back then to turn them into house workers etc? Plus, it's surely just more emotionally damaging to be apart from your parents, I don't think you can get much out of that as an experiment.
BTW other commentors, there are options to choose a nick besides Anonymous. It's nice for the sake of replying, to have something more specific than 'Anonymous' to aim at, when there are about 50 of them and no timestamp to distinguish them.
It's puzzling why the boarding schools set up to train and help mainstream Native American Indians and Australian Aborigines into modern Western society are seen as so evil today. See the movie "Australia" for a silly contemporary villification of the ever-present evil white man come to snatch the transendentally spiritual "halfling" (term from said movie).
These boarding schools seem to have been designed, pushed, and often funded in part by the very same do-good enlightened elite elements of society that now vehemently demonize them today. This villification is used to create a false sense of guilt to prod the masses into supporting today's elites' next utopian plan.
I suspect that the massive social engineering by the elites of the past 50yrs via government and other means such as affirmative action will be viewed as evil and inhumane by future generations of elites due to their ineffectiveness at substantailly channging the underlying problems of the human condition.
This cycle is like a bicycle that must keep lurching forward towards failure least our elites face only a Paris Hilton-like existence. As modern society erodes evolutions' traditional life purposes embodied in individual morality, family, God, community and country it seems more people feel the need to create meaning out of such social engineering.
Aren't those 'to nice white people with liberal arts degrees' actually for the most part black women without liberal arts degrees? I'd be pretty surprised if the work force in daycare isn't pretty different by race and educational attainment of the parents...it sure is in the places I know.
Steve, nobody has proposed that these kids spend the nights away from their families, which, I suppose was done in the case of the boarding schools.
Gasoline sniffing is such a serious problem in Aboriginal communities today that gasoline sold in parts of Australia has to have an additive that makes it smell very bad.
Peter
"The Stolen Generation" is a lie. It's as made up as the movie "Australia".
"This practice is now denounced as "The Stolen Generation," and the US government recently engaged in an orgy of self-congratulation over apologizing for it and made large monetary settlements to those communities hurt."
There fixed that for you. Seriously, liberals/leftists will never be blamed, it will be pushed down the memory hole and regular whites will have to shoulder the guilt (and monetary payouts).
Another target of universal preschool is the private preschool. Now you pay for preschool. That industry would largely be out of business. Also, those preschool teachers now at St. Johns and Beth Yeshuren couldn't get those public school jobs unless they were certified through the gov't programs. Their private accreditation would not count. So there are some more $$ for gov't institutions.
The target here is not so much the poor because they already have access to preschool because limited English students and econ. disadvantaged already qualify for free public preschool. The target is the preschool industry and the teachers. Many private schools' total enrollment is disproportionately preschool students. The preschool program helps them stay solvent.
Why aren't you commenting on the TAS post about universal Head Start?
And universal Head Start is the perfect oxymoron. (NCLB may still be the perfect oxymoronic program.)
In this case, I think the conventional wisdom is correct, but actually doesn't go far enough. Given the plasticity of the human brain at early ages, you really can get amazing cognitive outcomes through intensive early intervention. You see this all the time with the current state of the art autism therapies-- they make amazing strides in rewiring childrens' brains for better cognition and socially appropriate through sheer repetition, breaking down tasks into smaller components, and reinforcement of positive behaviors. One could do the same to overcome the cognitive and behavioral deficits of ghetto kids, but it would be amazingly expensive and labor intensive as well as intrusive and a pretty clear rebuke of inner city parenting norms. I don't think anyone in this society is ready to do what it would actually take to erase the achievement gap.
The conventional wisdom of the Obama Era appears to be that the solution to black underachievement [sic] is that we should take poor black children away from their mothers for as long as possible each day and turn them over to nice white people with liberal arts degrees for almost their entire waking hours.
Blacks are not underachieving. They are doing their best, given their genetic set of circumstances.
The white high-IQ liberals with middle class values can surely do a better job than low-IQ mothers with underclass values.
Now, if only people would take my advice and my the teaching of middle class values an official part of the program, we'd see an improvement in non-g-related measures.
For more information about teaching middle class values, read my blog post on the subject.
er, i actually think taking black kids away from their parents and letting whites raise them probably does help. isn't the president of the united states an example of this?
this is practically the way all single white american women with mulatto kids do it anyway. can you go to a mall in america and NOT see a white grandmother with her little half black grandkids?
wasn't one of the high draft picks in the NFL this year raised this way? michael oher?
the problem, of course, is that usually all this does is help the adult blacks be even more pro-black. barack obama has his white ancestors to thank for essentially everything, so he thanks them by throwing them under the bus and siding with blacks.
I was suspicious about the Aussie film "Rabbit Proof Fence", purportedly about 3 half-Abo girls who escaped their concentration camp bording school (to which--according to the film--they had been transported in crates), and walked hundreds of miles home. Turns out the girls, interviewed decades later, say this was not their story. At least one became well integrated in mainstream society -- I think she was returned to school eventually -- and doesn't want to identify much with Abo culture.And no, she did not become a maid. In fact she did some sort of desk work as I recall.
The reasons they were taken in the first place was that they were being abused and some of their elders wished for them to go. They went accompanied by a white social worker, part of the journey was by boat and they stopped en route for lunch and lemonade. Yet the movie has them locked in crates like animals.
Why do whites vilify themselves for crimes of which they are not even guilty? They will even lie against themselves in behalf of non-whites. In fact, the whites thought they were helping, up to a point.
What aroused suspicions and caused me to do some research was a scene from the film where the guard takes a girl into a shed and sheers off her hair for trying to escape. We see her sobbing and shamed in the dark later on.
That scene was straight out of 1997 "Sex in a Cold Climate", a documentary on the Church and State sponsored enslavement and often horrifying abuse of "wayward" girls and illegitimate children in Ireland's infamous nun-run laundries. Not that all nuns and priests were guilty, but quite a few were. A movie came out about it c. 2003. RPF came out somewhere between these this film and 97 docu.
I sort of know how these movie-screen writers minds work. They plagiarize endlessly and are prone to play to whatever heartstrings squeek the loudest at a given time.
The film was actually slanderous to some of the persons named in it. I'm sure that boarding school system had it's grim side, and a grim film might have been justified. But not this anti-white propaganda, at least not for this story. Next part of my investigation: who exactly made it and why? I always hated red-baiting but apparently there is a lively still communist organization in Australia and they finger the usual suspects. I don't know if that's it, but that's one theory out there.
btw, the best educated, smartest, most genuinely integrated blacks of my acquaintance were educated in British run boarding schools in Africa. One woman recalled her days there and said that the fine old building, and other old buildings left by the British, had all been destroyed in the early 2000s during civil war in that West African country.
While there's a percentage of smart people in these poor places, basically trying to educate most of Africa and a lot of the rest of the "third world" is a losing proposition. A basic level is easily obtainable but the pressure for equality is as achievable as it is in inner city Detroit. There has been no tradition of literacy and organized education--they never developed writing or structured math, and have had no reputation of being quick studies when given the opportunity in other lands. It's just not in their genes, they don't understand it at some very deep level, know it's foreign and many want to destroy it. They destroyed the schools in Haiti too, in the 1980s
Meanwhile, David Brooks is getting all breathless about the Harlem miracle.
Steve generally has good insight, but on this he is overlooking the fact that the poor are already in gov't funded preschool. Just as the poor are already on the dole and medicaid. Universal preschool is about extending the reach of gov't up the social scale to get more working people in programs controlled by the gov't. This is like the gov't health insurance proposal. The really poor qualify for medicaid. The folks up the social scale who don't have insurance but are working so they don't qualify for medicaid are the target. By increasing gov't services to people to the point that 51% get gov't stuff without paying taxes for it ensures a voter base for the elites who then sell the rest of the gov't influence to their friends for kickbacks and deals.
Given the plasticity of the human brain at early ages, you really can get amazing cognitive outcomes through intensive early intervention. You see this all the time with the current state of the art autism therapiesWhy would you think that techniques used on autistic kids should or could be used on normal kids?
You can go really fast in motorized wheelchairs. Does that mean we should give them to people with working legs?
The "intensive early intervention" needed by the normal human child is normal human parenting.
"Anonymous said...
"This practice is now denounced as "The Stolen Generation," and the US government recently engaged in an orgy of self-congratulation over apologizing for it and made large monetary settlements to those communities hurt."
There fixed that for you."
It is rude to change what someone else wrote and then smugly and snarkily say "There fixed that for you".
It is not clever. It is stupid, juvenile, and annoying. Write your own damned thoughts and stop monkeying with those of others.
Being a Progressive means never having to remember, apologize for, or adjust your programs to history. At most, yesterday's errors are merely fresh ammunition for today's rhetoric - until they're adopted again tomorrow.
Madonna could adopt all of them. She would save plane fare to Malawi.
All government intervention is a win/win for liberals. If it works, it proves the liberal philosophy is correct. If it doesn't work (and it rarely does) it proves that the system is evil and even more oversight committees and diversity boards are necessary.
Since it is evil and racist to question the underlying philosophy that drives these policies, we can only point fingers and blame the most politically convenient target for their failure.
Why do white people have this constant need to do what they perceive to be morally good for non-whites? If there is anything that history teaches it is that this sort of effort will always be viewed as morally evil anyway. It doesn't matter if it works or if it doesn't work. The reason the bulk of the human population (which is non-white) respects western civilization is because of the power it projects. All else are just fairy tales we tell children. The follow-up question is then: why has the main discourse of our civilization become a fairy tale, a fantasy, and a ruse? The follow-up question to that is: why do civilizations always become dumb, soft, and then decline? All these isteve topics seem to reduce to this rype of questioning.
My own view is that these programs have worked, for American blacks as well as for the Australians (I know a lot less about the Australians). Constant immersion in white society has probably been responsible for the 1 stddev rise in IQ between African blacks and American blacks.
Now here's a scary thought: As the rest of America becomes more and more like Detroit, American blacks will revert to living in their own societies, ruled by their own people, in their own schools, with little contact with educated white people. There will be a dramatic drop-off and then a reversal of IQ gains. Black children who had an IQ potential of 85 if they were intensively aided by "Head Start" and public schools that spend at least double per capita compared to white public schools, will revert to the African mean when they are taught by fellow blacks.
What will be the implications of this scenario for the future of the United States? Perhaps we could think of it as the "Haitianization of America" (with the distinction that blacks aren't an absolute majority here).
"Aren't those 'to nice white people with liberal arts degrees' actually for the most part black women without liberal arts degrees? I'd be pretty surprised if the work force in daycare isn't pretty different by race and educational attainment of the parents...it sure is in the places I know."
Bingo, exactly right, just the point I was going to make.
These boarding schools seem to have been designed, pushed, and often funded in part by the very same do-good enlightened elite elements of society that now vehemently demonize them today. This villification is used to create a false sense of guilt to prod the masses into supporting today's elites' next utopian plan.
I have a sort of half-baked theory that relates this and other stuff on isteve. The PC name changing game, Bombay to Mumbai etc.
Many see these shifts in naming eg negro to colored to black to african american as status seeking. Basically, looking down on the bad guys who used the wrong words.
But maybe there is more to it. Earnest Mk1 liberals in one era can formulate a policy to uplift colored people, in time the policy fails and the usual suspects will be blamed. Then a generation later earnest Mk2 liberals can propose, in effect, the exact same policy while disavowing any connection to the historical policy - and its failure.
How?
Very, very simple, the old Mk1 liberals used the term 'colored', they were therefore racists and were acting in bad faith, never intending the policy to really succeed, undermining it in the subtle ways that only (white) racists can. We modern Mk2 liberals are the real liberals, you can tell because we don't use the term 'colored', we say 'African-American', ergo we are not racists and our policy will succeed.
So, the usual status battle - we are better than those old guys - but you've got a handy feature built in to explain the failure of the old policy. One which will in turn be used against you. Again and again...
Hey! It worked for Obama! Three white folks were assigned to raise him as one of their own in a Hawaii high rise, send him to an expensive white prep school and then send him to the Ivy League and look at how he turned out. Hell the boy was so white I hear he had to learn ebonics from a book.
I heard they didn't even want him back on the "Res" on the Chicago South Side because he "ack so white".
I heard he was so tortured by the loss of his nation and his people, so alienated from their natural rhythms and culture, so uncomfortable with the white milieu in which he as raised that he wrote a tragic, tortured autobiography.
Maybe you heard of it?
What is needed most, in inner-city Black communities, is male role models. See Black Blogger "the Rawness" to get a sense of that, particularly his post "the Myth of the Alpha Ghetto Male."
Education has almost no men in it. First, any man in education is suspected of sexual abuse, unless he's gay. Second, female domination makes it a very poor choice for status wrt women, who don't need Mr. Steady Paycheck (that may change in a decade or two, but that's not the case now). Women seek excitement, dominance, masculine mastery. None of which can be found in the deeply feminized Education establishment.
The best thing for poor Black kids would be to encourage their parents to marry and stay together. Which means bottom line controlling female black sexuality to find one "beta provider guy" among the population, marry him, and stay with him. Not have 3 different kids by three different fathers.
Do that and the schools in the Ghetto, underfunded and run down as they are, will do a good enough job just as the traditionally Black Colleges such as Grambling and Morehouse did a good enough job educating young professional Black men and women under segregation. Because the most important part of education starts with the family -- the father at home, involved in his kid's life.
The Rawness points out that in the Ghetto, there are basically no men over 25, and under 65. The men who would be there are dead, in jail, or moved away from the madness of men raised by single women, lacking any masculine control to let certain insults just pass, picking battles, and controlling emotion. The slightest insult becomes an act of deadly revenge.
It is significant that the few models that DO seem to work with average Black Ghetto boys exclude the street, create a group identity (uniforms) and have the equivalent of strict football coaches drilling the boys in discipline as much as mastery of the subject matter. These schools don't perform miracles (none of the boys get straight 5's on the AP tests across the board) but do turn out kids who are solid citizens and mostly go on to college either four year or JC/four year.
And that's good enough to get the job done. But it only works for "some" average boys. The real solution is that old bugaboo of liberals -- the nuclear family. [Which is why Jamaican or Nigerian poor but nuclear family immigrants often do well, while US Ghetto blacks fail -- the nuclear family.]
We had univeral preschool back in my day. It was called kindergarten.
I think most of you are long-time conservatives, which makes you only abstractly acquainted with the goals of leftism. This plan has been compared to Australian policies toward the aborigines; another good comparison is foreign aid to Africa. I know leftists, and I guarantee you they are not naive. The leftists know exactly what will come of their plan:
(A) The kids will be reasonably safe in the care of the white swine - uhhh, I mean, in the care of nice educated liberals. They will not allowed to run with scissors, not exposed to peeling lead paint, given reasonably nutritious food, spoken to in measured tones.
(B) The kids will not turn into rocket scientist material, or even mechanical engineering technologist material. Their standardized test scores will remain firmly below average.
(C) While the program is in force, (A) will be used to shore it up and provide the left with the self-congratulation they need. After it is gone, (B) will be used to attack it and to slur whites.
(D) Whites will be asked to pay for the programs while they are in force and are a good thing. After they are stopped, they will be turned into a bad thing, and whites will be asked to pay reparations for them.
Fast-forward to the future:
Once upon a time, putting Black kids into the care of educated devils was considered progressive, even liberal! I know, I know, it sounds strange, but men like Barack Obama were considered liberals for their time. Of course, the scandals that brought his administration down in 2011 (and not a moment too soon!) were caused by his latent conservative tendencies, but when he was elected, people thought he was a liberal.
Lots of people supported it back then. Many blue-eyed devils (who caused the banking crisis, as proven by the President of Brazil) said they were being "fair" and "just" to Black people - by stealing their children from their very homes! They told themselves that by letting the kids go home at the end of the day, they weren't destroying the Black Family (which was utterly and completely intact in 2009 due to the fact that black people never lie or abandon their spouses).
But then - it happened - disaster! The Black kids from those programs grew up with lower "IQs" (as measured by a type of test invented by Hitler, Stalin, and other anti-socialist conservatives to make poor people look bad). Few of the kids grew up to be civil rights lawyers. I know, boys and girls, it's strange to contemplate, but less than half of the public were employed as civil rights lawyers back in 2009! The Black kids were forced (forced at gunpoint) to work in jobs such as sales, food service, transportation, and education ... work fit only for robots! Isn't that horrible?
The only solution - to elect, at long last, Black people to important positions in The Government. (Memorize for extra credit: They used to call The Government "the Federal government" to distinguish all the mini-governments that used to have some powers over small parts of the country.) Pray that that delightful young Senator from the Virgin Islands will one day become THE FIRST BLACK PRESIDENT!We need to come to terms with how firmly they control the present, and the past, and the future.
Maximilian: "As the rest of America becomes more and more like Detroit, American blacks will revert to living in their own societies, ruled by their own people, in their own schools, with little contact with educated white people. There will be a dramatic drop-off and then a reversal of IQ gains. Black children who had an IQ potential of 85 if they were intensively aided by "Head Start" and public schools that spend at least double per capita compared to white public schools, will revert to the African mean when they are taught by fellow blacks."
Precisely. This is the reason that David Brooks' hyperventilating is so silly. (http://tinyurl.com/p6hv7a) Brooks' "Promise School" model isn't so much education, bit black cultural replacement, with interventions at every level of a child's daily existence. The cost of this hand-holding and spoon-feeding is outrageous, I am sure.
Other than David's rich white friends, who can afford this charity?
As the white population shrinks and are replaced by imported Chinese and Indians, black folks are going to find their generous benefactors disappearing.
And Mexicans couldn't care less what happens to black folks. Does Brooks imagine Vincente Fox and Carlos Slim are going to massively fund black ghetto youth?
Yet David Brooks assumes that there is going to be some groundswell of support for spending 20 grand a year on these kids.
I see a much more Dickensian future for them. And they had better adjust to it now.
PRO:
1. In the mid-nineteenth century through the 1930s, I believe, orphan trains took kids westward on a series of stops at which they were paraded before prospective parents and instantly adopted. Siblings were often separated but for many of these children, adoption into farm families was preferable to living on the streets of NYC as prostitutes, petty criminals, etc.
Yes, some of the kids were brutalized and adopted as workers, not children. For them, it was horrible … but was it worse than living on the streets?
2. Is our current system of foster care preferable to orphanages?
3. Similarly, will children raised in urban ghettos be better off in state-funded preschool or home with their television sets and drug/alcohol addicted mothers? Ditto, for poor rural kids.
CON:
1. Are kids raised in intact and healthy homes better off starting school as late as possible, perhaps at age eight, so the negative influences of public school socialization is lessened? Perhaps, in some families, the positive impact of schooling v. family weighs heavier on the family side of this continuum.
2. Who decides if a kid’s family is a positive or negative influence … some government-paid social worker? In essence, the issue of pushing kids into foster homes, orphanages, boarding schools boils down to the problem of exercising power over others. I would err on the side of freedom, not power – the almost total liberty to raise one’s kid “rightly – and let a few kids fall through the cracks. But is this harsh?
So Steve, it sounds like you might be a "Yes on 1D" vote. (For non- Californians, this is the proposition that allows funds dedicated to the first five program to be used to reduce the state deficit.)
It is rude to change what someone else wrote and then smugly and snarkily say "There fixed that for you".
You should have read the rest of the comment. You know, the part that started with "Seriously..." But I'll just chalk up your error to poor reading comprehension.
As for Mr. Sailer, I'm sure he'll get over it. He's tougher than he looks.
I agree that the liberals have unrealistic expectations of the whole universal preschool project.
But I think it is unfair to treat the liberals involved as self-interested, or selfish. I just don't think the liberals that actually go in to the ghetto to teach the NAMs have evil intentions. They are just trying to do a good deed. So many of them are jewish, and they at trying to do a mitzvah.
Of course they are misguided, but no more misguided than the patriotic young people that volunteered to go fight in Iraq on a fool's errand.
Sometimes liberals put themselves on a foolish mission with good intentions.
Look at Gerald Levin's family - this family certainly didn't need the income from sending their son to teach in the ghetto - they sent their son to die out of a misguided desire to do a mitzvah. The urge to do good things for the world drives some of the stupid things you chronicle on this blog
BELOW IS A NEWS STORY ON THIS
That is how Carol Levin learned of the death of her son. As almost the whole education world knows by now, Jonathan Levin, a 31-year-old English teacher at William Howard Taft High School in the Bronx and son of Gerald Levin, CEO of Time-Warner Inc., was accosted in his Upper West Side apartment, bound to a chair, cut numerous times with a steak knife in an effort to pry from him his ATM code, and then shot in the back of the head-"execution style," in tabloid speak.
The more years you can have any generation of kids in governmental schools, the more years you have to indoctrin ... uh, I mean ... teach them the correct values in life.
:-/
In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.
OK, now we can look forward to them earning billions because they know how to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.
We are saved!
"Anonymous said...
You should have read the rest of the comment. You know, the part that started with "Seriously..." But I'll just chalk up your error to poor reading comprehension."
I did read the rest of the comment. It still stinks. And I've seen that done many times before, here and elsewhere, and it always comes across as snarky and stupid - but I'll just chalk that up to puerility on your part.
Liberal leaders care about the children of poor knocked-up teen mothers because that serve well as literal poster children for greater government involvement in family life. The poor are always just the stalking horse.
What the drive for universal preschool seems to be all about is getting the children of the middle class indoctrinated by unionized government employees as early and as thoroughly as possible. All they need to do is "steal' one generation of the middle class and the battle is won. Come to think of it, the battle may be mostly over already.
@ Bodie or anyone else willing to comment:
What's the catch with this "Harlem Miracle"? The thing I'm probably most shocked about is how they were able to increase the average scores by so much (math percentile almost doubled!). From adoption studies, I figured these incredible gains were essentially impossible.
There has to be some catch that Brooks or the researchers aren't advertising.
Anonymous wrote:
"...It's puzzling why the boarding schools set up to train and help mainstream Native American Indians and Australian Aborigines into modern Western society are seen as so evil today...These boarding schools seem to have been designed, pushed, and often funded in part by the very same do-good enlightened elite elements of society that now vehemently demonize them today....I suspect that the massive social engineering by the elites of the past 50yrs via government and other means such as affirmative action will be viewed as evil and inhumane by future generations of elites due to their ineffectiveness..."
-----------------------
Exactly. I've thought this exact same thing about the residential schools in Canada, and the futility of the current approach to the aboriginal problems. But I haven't given up hope that things can be fixed.
I think the problems experienced by aboriginals are largely the result of alcoholism. I think aboriginals tend to have a genetic tendency to alcoholism, which I believe is a biological disease.
In Canada all the psychologists, social workers, etc (the do-good elite) have been taught that alcoholism is caused by racism, residential schools, and so forth, and think any talk of genetics is some sort of monstrous racism.
We don't have much chance of finding a way to cure alcoholism as long as the real scientists are afraid to even whisper about the genetic basis of the disease for fear of being branded as racists. So the politically correct, anti-genetic folks are actually preventing research that might lead to an affective treatment for alcoholism, and thus causing further suffering for the aboriginals (and non-aboriginal alcoholics too.)
Maybe these folks will be vilified by the next generation of do-gooders, just they vilify the people who started the residential schools.
I was arguing with mostly do-gooders who think I am a racist here:
http://www.wondercafe.ca/discussion/social/difference-iq-within-races
The thread starts out about IQ and race, then branches into alcoholism and race. I'm "Mely"
I've thought of myself as a left-leaning do-gooder most of my life, but I've changed a bit recently. Why are they so blind and stupid about genetics?
Here is another thread where they think I/m a racist.
http://www.wondercafe.ca/discussion/politics/aboriginal-policy
I think those peoples heads would explode if they read Steve Sailer's blog.
"Brooks' "Promise School" model isn't so much education, bit black cultural replacement, with interventions at every level of a child's daily existence. The cost of this hand-holding and spoon-feeding is outrageous, I am sure."
But the problem here is not an economic issue. If Brooks and Promise Academy are right, then this website is totally wrong. I think most here accept that innate intelligence exists. Also, that this innate intelligence has different distributions for different racial groups. In general, most of us accept the black/white/Asian gap as emanating mostly from genetic factors influenced by disparate evolutionary trajectories on the various continents.
If Brooks is right, then our hypothesis is almost entirely wrong. While his proposed solution is infeasible given the requisite time and money contributions, the Promise Academy seems to prove the gap is not as stubborn as we all believe it to be. A large scale program will never be instituted, but this study suggests the intelligence gap can be overcome through conditioning of the social and academic environment.
Because of this, I conclude there has got to be some catch to their study. Some hidden variable they're reluctant to advertise. I first thought it had something to do with admission not being a random lottery, but Brooks states the "typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math." So this seems unlikely. I'm honestly unsure how these enormous gains could be achieved without some intense manipulation of the results or complete neglect of important variables.
This study seems to purport a little doom on the hereditarian view.
Hopefully, Steve will have an entire post on this "Harlem Miracle" so can discuss it further.
"What is needed most, in inner-city Black communities, is male role models."
Wow T99, that was a good post. Smart, well thought-out and poignant. When you stop writing about your own life you are actually a good writer!
"I did read the rest of the comment. It still stinks. And I've seen that done many times before, here and elsewhere, and it always comes across as snarky and stupid -but I'll just chalk that up to puerility on your part."
So what part of "seriously" didn't you understand? And thanks for being the Comment Police. Snarky comments are down a whopping 24%!
I did read the rest of the comment. It still stinks. And I've seen that done many times before, here and elsewhere, and it always comes across as snarky and stupid - but I'll just chalk that up to puerility on your part.I too have seen the FTFY idiom used many times, and have never felt offended by it on behalf of the person being "corrected."
It is not clever. It is stupid, juvenile, and annoying. Write your own damned thoughts and stop monkeying with those of others.We will, just as soon as we finish eating these bananas and throwing our feces at the gawkers on the other side of that fence.
Now where did I put my organ grinder?
the Aussie historian Keith Windschuttle has a different account account of the 'stolen generation'.That would be this:
The Fabrication of Aboriginal History.
My work is done here; there are other blogs that need my help....
Anonymous: Second, the trouble with most U.S. black children (I mean really black, since the Mulatto Elite are a separate and mainly white culture) is not just their mothers but their entire sub-culture. The sub-culture has to be dismantled.
For the sake of complete and total intellectual honesty, will you allow yourself to consider the possibility that the people make the [sub-] culture?
And, if so, then would next consider the possibility that the eradication of a "culture" is in fact the eradication of its people?
Which is to say: Are you prepared to consider the possibility that the people are who they are, that you are not God, and that you do not possess the power to change them into something that they are not?
PS: Not to go all reductio ad Hitlerum on ya', but the folks in the culture-dismantlin' bidness tend to go by names like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and Pot.
But the problem here is not an economic issue. If Brooks and Promise Academy are right, then this website is totally wrong."This website" has never taken the position that children are incapable of learning.
You need to think your argument through. It's a loser.
"
1. Are kids raised in intact and healthy homes better off starting school as late as possible, perhaps at age eight, so the negative influences of public school socialization is lessened? Perhaps, in some families, the positive impact of schooling v. family weighs heavier on the family side of this continuum. "
Kirsten,
You realize the men who engineered the space program didn't go to school till they were 7 because there wasn't kindergarten when they were kids. It didn't seem to hurt them any. Being in a heathy home environment is not harmful to kids.
"Anonymous said...
So what part of "seriously" didn't you understand? And thanks for being the Comment Police. Snarky comments are down a whopping 24%!"
Good God, you are dense. I didn't say anything about your comment. I didn't care about the content of your comment, nor would I likely care about any of your opinions. What I was saying is: that little "fixed it for you" schtick (which is not unique to you) is rotten. It is putting words into other people's mouths, i.e., it is lying about what they said. And it is emblematic of the internet generation, which doesn't seem to care about attribution.
Or to put it terms you perhaps could understand:
"Anonymous said...
So what part of "I, anonymous, am a child molester" didn't you understand?"
There. Fixed that for you.
Get it now?
"clem said...
I too have seen the FTFY idiom used many times, and have never felt offended by it on behalf of the person being "corrected.""
I believe that in quoting someone, you have an obligation to put only what they actually said between the quotation marks. Not doing so is an unfair arguing tactic.
Universal preschool aims to defund private preschool. Right now many people can put away $$ in a tax free child care account. Instead of continuing to allow these tax credit deals to middle class folks, while at the same time paying the entire bill for the poor, they want to pull the child care credit which helps tax payers get a break on child care.
http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=106189,00.html
If the child is below the compulsory attendance age for school, the parent can claim the child care credit. By lowering the compulsory attendance age, the gov't cancels the child care credit. The credit is not exactly a voucher, but functions similarly.
A typical private school for children PreK to 6th grade for example might have as much as 20% of its enrollment in Pre K.
Universal PreK is a direct attack on private schools.
The left wants all mothers to work. See e.g. Swenden
Half Sigma
The white high-IQ liberals with middle class values can surely do a better job than low-IQ mothers with underclass values.That is poorly motivated hite high-IQ liberals with 20 toddlers verses highly motivated relatives with 1,2,3 maybe 4.
Post a Comment