Economy
Norb Leahy reports on the relative wealth of nations:
Education
So far as it goes, I think the ThompsonBlog nailed it:
"
Readers will note that the students, these avowed opponents of racism, refer to themselves, and by extension all black students, as if they were some ancient and unfathomable offshoot of humanity, for whom rapport with outsiders is impossible. And who are supposedly oppressed by the unremarkable fact that, in a white-majority country, their professors will often be white and – as seems unavoidable – older than the students. Readers may also wonder how such exquisitely sensitive creatures will fare when faced with potential employers who may also be paler than themselves and, shockingly, not nineteen.
In short, the students are admitting, albeit unwittingly, that in fact they are the inflexible and bigoted ones, the ones preoccupied with racist and ageist stereotypes, and are incapable of feeling “comfortable” with people whose appearance differs from their own. Apparently, for them, learning is next to impossible unless they are being taught by people who look just like them, are of a similar age, and who share the assumptions of a subset of nineteen-year-olds who are very much accustomed to flattery and indulgence.
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This does not mean that there shouldn't be more Black male professors, or that there's not a howling need for good Black men teachers in elementary and secondary schools. It does not mean we shouldn't support men who can meet that need.
In the DC schools' adult education program I met a man who was older than I was, at the time--in his early forties--and had never learned the multiplication table. I guessed what his problem was, correctly, it turned out. He was not stupid. He was smart, slick, and attractive enough that he'd got through his early life without needing to sit down and learn elementary lessons he'd failed to learn in elementary school. How he got through his early life, I didn't want to know. At the time he wanted to get a GED and a legitimate job; our job was to help him do that. How trustworthy he'd be in the said legitimate job, I didn't want to know either. For the moment, his problem seemed to be that younger men teachers, the older male teacher who was White, and women teachers distracted him by reactivating behavior patterns from his past--he was too busy showing off and self-monitoring and competing to focus on math and grammar. I happened to know an older man with teaching skills and a dark complexion. I begged him to volunteer as a tutor and work with this student. Within a month the student passed the GED test, with high scores, and qualified for a legitimate job. The tutor who could be seen as the father or grandfather figure so many problem students lacked was in great demand. All over the city, we saw problem students calming down and learning things from him.
Well, he had a special gift for teaching. He also taught me to enjoy married life. But the demographic factor obviously meant a lot to the "worst problem" students.
And still...as my loved and missed husband so often said..."It's a two-way street." College students need to recognize, and work against, the prejudices that make the demographic factor so important to what may be the horribly abused, neglected, and underdeveloped minds of problem students. College students are supposed to be the gifted and talented ones, being prepared for the top jobs. They ought to be stretching their minds and building their ability to form rapport with people different from them, even to the extent of taking language immersion courses overseas. From them, whining about needing any particular physical type of teachers is tacky.
I'm not saying that students may not be aware of, and choose to support, a particular Black male teacher's wish for promotion to a more prestigious and better paid teaching job. I'm not saying that such a teacher may not deserve to teach graduate courses at a big-name university instead of teaching remedial fourth-grade math classes in a ghetto school. I am saying that the ghetto school needs him more, that if he's the kind of man who most deserves the students' admiration he's likely to choose to stay in the ghetto school, and while it's fine for the students to support a teacher's ambitions, it's stupid for them to let demographic factors keep them from learning from whatever professors a college has.
I think it's a valuable experience to learn things in courses taught by individuals you, the student, positively dislike, and who may positively dislike you. Even if they are racists, sexists, ageists, other kinds of bigots, bores, full of outdated information, teaching outside their own field of study, even if they're Losing It to the point where they repeat the first lecture they used to give in the class every day for a month. Some of the most rewarding learning experiences I had involved working around, or against, teachers who were downright incompetent. One of those, by the way, was a young woman for whose younger sister I used to be mistaken during the years when the sister and I were Bright Young Things in Washington. One of the things I learned from the teacher who could have passed for a sister or cousin of mine was that I would have preferred to have taken the class from the older man she was hired to replace, on the whole...but that I learned a good deal about the subject by working around Ms Shiny-New-BA-In-A-Different-Subject, anyway.
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