Quantum Loop Gravity Be For Whitey

[Eric Cordian]

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"