When it comes to issues of academics, education, and learning, I’m usually one to side with teachers. Kids have become more aggressive, more violent, more sexualized, and more empowered in the last 25 years, and teachers are usually not allowed the resources or the ability to legally respond appropriately. I am now realizing that I may still stand with teachers, but not with administrators.
Becoming a principal or member of the school’s administrative hierarchy has increasingly meant a loss of common sense. They can’t necessarily stop hiring teachers who will promote socially sick ideology because, as I understand it, there’s a shortage of teachers. Having watched friends struggle to get teaching jobs because of the hoops and the wait periods, only to get a meager salary and no one satisfied with the state of your job and frequently with your job performance, I can easily understand why the shortage exists.
So occasionally a teacher slips through the cracks, gets into the educational system, and starts telling kids that there’s rat poison in toothpaste and that calling men by the title of ‘mister’ refers to an old appellation to ‘slave master.’ I’m sure this teacher is as focused and dedicated to her children- in fact, I’d say she’s far more dedicated than most other teachers. Insanity allows breaches of decorum such as what I’ve described to give her that “extra edge.”
But teaching kids the wrong things is blatantly destructive. In the sample I’m citing, it comes from a teacher from Houston (link http://www.click2houston.com/news/14548613/detail.html) who has sad a number of conspiratorial, unproven things and labeled them as true and fact. “She said sugar is cocaine,” one of her students told her parents. The teacher may feel that sugar is addictive; she may feel that sugar only comes from heavily oppressed areas of the world; she may even take those feelings and impose them on a white powder. But to use her power to tell kids that sugar is cocaine is something over which one should lose their jobs. And she will not lose her job; if she were released, she would then sue for sexism, racism, restriction on free speech, violation of union rules, and any other number of legal paths that now exist.
I get worked up when someone spouts a ‘truth’ about something chemical that is meant to scare people, to drive a sense of fear about something for which there is no grounds to be afraid. The rat poison in toothpaste statement nudged me the wrong way. Toothpaste contains sodium fluoride. Virtually every tube in your drug store or supermarket will show this. Sodium fluoride is a poison in excess. Fluoride ions can seriously mess with a body’s metabolism- IN EXCESS. Ultimately what should be noted is that no one is suing Proctor Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, Unilever, or any other companies that make toothpaste for releasing toothpastes with rat poison. A battalion of scientists would laugh them into the dirt. But this false knowledge would be perpetuated by the internet. “Good thing the anti-fluoridation kooks are still out there.” (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_12_55/ai_103135852)
When you think of this as a singular issue, it may ruffle your feathers a bit but for the most part you will let it go. “Most teachers teach the curriculum, they are not abusing their positions and they do a darn good job.” In that case, why are kids in inner cities so far behind compared to suburban kids? Report after report in every city in the nation reports “inner cities falling behind,” “disparity between urban minorities and affluent suburbs,” and such. This has been the case at least 20 years, and probably has been for far longer. Why does this disparity exist?
Racism, of course! Silly, haven’t you learned? It’s because teachers are racist!
(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/12/MNH8T5LTC.DTL)
Yes. The education gap has nothing to do with selfish or overworked, uninvolved parents; underfunded schools are just as capable as fully funded ones; cultural desires to eschew English in favor of native tongues do not impact any child; heck, a cultural assault on the educated in general has no impact at all. You’re going to die in the streets tomorrow, so why learn anything? All you need to know is get a gun, get the money, do drugs, and kill anyone that tries to stop you.
Some like to cite that the best teachers don’t want to teach in the inner cities, and the reason is usually postulated to be that they are racist. On its surface, that’s a semi-legitimate claim because most kids in those schools are minorities- but that also implies that no minority teachers are amongst the best teachers. Surely a minority teacher wouldn’t be racist against their own race, would they? The minority teachers wanting to teach in the suburbs wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that those schools have modern textbooks and roofs that don’t leak.
Nope, it’s a racial issue. And parents don’t influence their kids’ educations as much as schools. Mommy getting home from her second job and not caring about whether the boy got a ‘B’ or the girl has extra credit because she’s tired and just wants a break, that has nothing to do with it. Mommy working two jobs because daddy isn’t there, that has less to do with the education of a child than the school’s obvious and blatant racism.
The fact that Asian-Americans, disadvantaged or not, are a minority and blow away even white children regardless of their financial status says that Asians are not a minority or just simply don’t count. It has nothing to do with the culture of their parents driving them to get high scores in school so that they can go to college and make good money, nothing at all.
And the final nail in all of this is the charge that it’s because the education is Eurocentric.
I’m all for learning about other cultures, and I’m all for becoming more worldly. But this country, this system of employment and economy, of real estate, of everything that people need to know in order to understand why they live in the society they do is because virtually our entire existence is dominated by people, cultures, and nationalities who came from Europe. Further, people who came from other locations may have had an impact, but until rampant tribalism starts re-emerging amongst those of African descent; until our classical literature is dominated by authors from Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, Indonesia, or Bolivia; until the island nations of Micronesia develop an entirely new and fully efficient mathematical system; until Amazonian tribes create a detailed philosophy that explains modern man; and until someone can document how any region in the world has done more to create every modern convenience that China, Europe, or the United States has done, then the education will have no choice but to be Eurocentric.
“It’s not relevant to me.” Bull.
Almost every facet of your modern existence is a product of European culture except your genetic history. I agree that all history should be taught, absolutely should be made relevant, but to hide behind that and say “I don’t need to know math or science because they’re not relevant to my culture” is to remain willfully ignorant. And that only perpetuates rat poison as toothpaste myths, sugar as cocaine accusations, and racist diatribes against teachers not teaching in inner city schools.
No wonder we’re so far behind the rest of the world in education. The facts are no longer relevant to Americans.
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