printSteve Sailer has an interesting take on “the media-celebrated documentary ‘Waiting for ‘Superman,'” and by extension, on the “Public Enemy No. 1: Government Unions” (the title of my new, WND column). “Davis Guggenheim, white liberal dad, winner of an Oscar for the Al Gore documentary,” writes Sailer, “drives past three public schools in Venice every morning to get to a private school in Santa Monica. He muses on the narration that he felt he was ‘betraying the ideals I thought I lived by.'”
Why, then, doesn’t he send them to public school? Well, the obvious reason is because public schools in Venice are full of Hispanics and blacks (one of them is 95 percent Non-Asian Minority), and, privately, Guggenheim doesn’t think his kids will get as good an education in a classroom that has to cater to NAM needs. But, no way no how is he ever going to say that in public. He’d never get another Oscar.
[Read “Hoist By Their Own Petard In Wisconsin”]
Is Steve implying that the thesis of “The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education,” a pathbreaking book by VDARE.COM editor Peter Brimelow, no longer obtains? In “The Worm,” Brimelow mounted a devastating case against the monopolistic nature of public education as the root of most of this system’s evils. He did so by analyzing “the efficiency of the education system, as expressed in its output and input.”
I would say that both the liberal director of “Waiting for Superman” and Steve Sailer are resorting to reductionism. There is more to the colossal failure of American schooling than the aggregate racial achievement gap in schools that are increasingly dominated by minorities. Conversely, government unions are not the whole story.
From my perspective, the film “Idiocracy” offered the most multifaceted treatment of creeping cretinism in America. The best of social science (kidding, of course).
One can demonstrate (and many have), purely from first principles and without resorting to any empirical evidence (though there is plenty) that government education is a horrible idea. Srdja Trifkovic recently had a great piece in Chronicles about the quality (ha!) of American education, and his comparison to the classical European education that persisted even in Communism is particularly instructive.
I think it was John Taylor Gatto who said, rebelling against the GovEd racket a generation ago (paraphrasing): They don’t only teach children the wrong answers, they teach them to ask the wrong questions.
It isn’t about race, it’s about creating obedient subjects of the government.
Absolutely right! Thats how I feel about the issue. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive. As Cato’s extensive work has shown, yes the results of vouchers and other semi-free experiments in education are not dramatically better than the socialist schools, BUT THEY COST MUCH LESS! So efficiency and productivity are dramatically increased.
Steve Sailer makes a better case for ‘demography is destiny’ in a different post. He breaks out recent American PISA scores by ethnic and racial group and then compares those scores to their cousins in their ancestral homelands. Whites for example outscore every Euro nation except Finland. Latinos outscore every Latin American nation. And Asians are only beaten by a small subset in China. Bottom line, US schools are doing a good job. It’s the changing demographic mix that is affecting the overall US average.