RE: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey

Well I be darned if Mr May hasn't inspired a major burst of eloquence, between this response and Mr Young's. As for this comment: "Schools don't educate, but merely serve as a filter for employers to locate those individuals who aren't going to make trouble at the factory." At best. In the inner cities the function of schools is strongly hinted at by the following well-used phrase: "Stay In School!" In other words, schools keep the crime rates down, as is a well-known statistic. They are basically storage facilities. For real schools we white folks with $$$ can move out to the suburbs or send our kids to private school. As for,

Nonetheless, I think we do such people a disservice when we attribute their dislike of the education business to some sort of culturally ingrained sloth, and characterize them as looking to live on handouts of other peoples tax money.

I basically agree with this, though no doubt there are "Leaders" that play on this (and the latent laziness of all teeneagers) to a tune similar to what May is saying. But in most cases, even "good" schools are a joke, and black folks at least realize this. Did anyone notice that there's only 1 or 2 states in the nation that still require Regents endorsements? I'll tell you a story. Back in the late 1980s I taught at a notorious HS in Bedford Stuyvesant. 90% of my students were black. I regarded few of them as stupid, but almost none of them saw the point of studying math...they just didn't see how it could benefit them, and they said this to me on a regular basis. In one class I had some relatively young and non-troublemaking students. I told them from the beginning that I would not slip the standards so they could pass...they HAD to do homework in order to pass, as that would be the only way they could practice enough for the tests. For the first couple of tests all of the non-immigrant black kids failed. But I hammered them and told them it was going to continue like this unless they did the homework and studied. I made it absolutely clear what I expected from them. By the end of the semester most of the kids were doing their homework, and passing the quizzes and tests, which I did not make easier in any way. I remember Willie Horne coming in before a test and "complaining" "Mr Durden, I STUDIED last night!". I reached out to feel his forehead and said "Willie? Are you feelin' alright?" Of course, he pulled back and stifled a smile, but he got a 90. -TD

From: Eric Cordian To: cypherpunks@minder.net Subject: Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey Date: Thu, 1 Jan 2004 00:14:10 -0800 (PST)

Tim May observes:

...

Meanwhile, the "black folk" kept listening to Rev. Jess Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton tell them that they were owed reparations, that they were owed a series of "entitlements." No suprise that a large fraction of negro teens subscribe to the view that "reading be for whitey." In fact, negroes have invented a whole series of insult terms for those who study too much, for those who break out of the "field worker" status: Uncle Toms, Oreos, etc.

...

Imagine where the Asians would be if Asian kids who did well in science and math were taunted as race traitors?

...

"Math be for whitey. Reading be for whitey. We be owed repa-ations for diskiminashun!!"

In the real world, a society can not consist 100% of chip designers. It also requires cooks, toilet and floor scrubbers, and people who lug concrete in wheelbarrows up stairs.

This is no problem in a society with an explicit class system. You just assign jobs to people based on their social class, with the untouchables getting the shit-hauling and scrubbing jobs, and the more attractive jobs going to their betters. Some countries, like the US and Japan, have as a part of their political doctrine that everyone has the opportunity to be wealthy and successful, so they can't openly have a class system. Of course, they still need one to determine who gets the shit-hauling jobs, and the usual method of doing this is to hide the class system in the education system. Now you don't get the shit-hauling job because you are an untouchable. You get it because you "didn't do well" in school, or you "dropped out, and "you could have been successful if you had just tried harder."

Of course, it's a zero sum game. The bottom X% will always be shit-haulers, and the school is just making the proles fight with each other over who those shit-haulers will be. The fact is that the society can't make everyone successful, and the success of the few is at the expense of the failure of the many, determined by the uncompensated rat race and endless toil on the wheel of public education.

The US is an excellent example of this. The AFT and NEA together are the biggest labor organization in the country. THe school system functions not to educate, but as a tool of inculcation in collectivist thinking, and a awarder of certificates which give one the right to work.

Schools don't educate, but merely serve as a filter for employers to locate those individuals who aren't going to make trouble at the factory.

A well known experiment is to take some 10th graders, and divide them randomly into two groups. Send one to college, and make the others finish the remaining two years of high school. THere will be no statistically significant difference in their college performance, thus demonstrating that public schools do not teach, but merely act as filters through which only the most talented and sociable can pass.

Now, minorities in this country, including almost all Asians, and quite a few blacks, have gotten with this program that "education is the way out of poverty," and have successfully turned the vicious education-based class system to their advantage, by trying to beat the dominant class at their own game, with varying degrees of success. This has required them to refrain from criticizing the system itself, because no one wins a beauty contest by having a bad attitude.

I think that mentality is changing, and when you hear comments like "Reading be for whitey," what is being said is not that literacy and calculus and physics and chemistry are bad, in and of themselves, but that a system which rewards only "getting ahead by playing along" is not a arena in which these people choose to compete.

Learning by doing is always vastly superior to learning by listening to someone else talk about doing.

Now in a world where most jobs are not skilled people individually producing something in demand, but are the very lowest form of commoditized labor, the opportunity to screw such dissenters probably exceeds their ability to avoid being sent made to the back of the line.

Nonetheless, I think we do such people a disservice when we attribute their dislike of the education business to some sort of culturally ingrained sloth, and characterize them as looking to live on handouts of other peoples tax money.

-- Eric Michael Cordian 0+ O:.T:.O:. Mathematical Munitions Division "Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be The Whole Of The Law"

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