Steve 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).
