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I was listening to NPR this morning and they were talking about how may schools try to ensure that there is an even balance of children who get the free lunch program in all their schools. This not only effectually balances a big portion of a schools budget each day, but also inherently creates diversity.
Perhaps our resources would be better spent teaching teachers how to teach diversity to their students and encourage it in their classes.
Spending resources (time, money, laws) to enforce physical quotas is silly because being in the room with a bunch of races doesn't teach you about diversity in races. I think our resources would be better spent teaching teachers how to teach diversity to their students and encourage it in their classes.
Diversity isn't a verb . . . teaching is.
The attitudes that kids have are going to be well formed by the time they get to school.
You can teach tolerance. You can teach children to embrace differences (not just race) and recognize diversity. If you couldn't teach children to recognize diversity, there's be no racism. It sounds like your argument is that you can't influence a child's philosophies on life?
0.17 seconds on Google can find thousands of articles on How to Teach Diversity.
Note: Strangest semantics argument ever.
I went to college in the middle of nowhere Midwest. It was a large school however so we had a wildly diverse population including many students from out of state (such as myself) or foreign countries. Many students who had literally never seen a black person in real life, having come from their graduating class of 16, were now living next to people who's native language was not their own.
I had the opportunity to watch some unintentionally racist people learn to embrace cultures that were as foreign to them as the Internet is to many people you meet every day. This is diversity. These are people embracing diversity who had 18 years of their life worth of experience and prejudice to un-do, and they did it beautifully.
My argument is merely that you can teach this kind of tolerance in a classroom.
Sorry for the red herring, but this happened in a whisper.
When I hire an artist (I have hired many in the past for odd jobs) I look at the quality of their work and the suitability of their style to the project in question. I don't care what the color of the skin is. I only care about the quality of their artwork.
Further, why should a student with an excellent academic record be kept out of a school because they are the wrong race? I'm more interested in promoting a meritocracy than a diversitocracy (yeah, I made that word up).
I'm not saying that affirmative action is the solution, but this gap in the education process is one of the issues it's trying to solve.
I just had a conversation with a friend of mine from work about this today. This example is more pertinent to many of our lives. She was forced out of her job and had to take a job (with my group) getting paid a lot less. A single mom of two she's been trying to complete her bachelors degree at night but had to stop working on that when she lost her last job so she could get a second part-time job to make up for the lost income. So now she's working two jobs, still making less then she did before, and is going into debt anyway.
Last week she started getting calls from the student loan people because it's time to start paying them (six months after stopping school). She doesn't have the money to pay for the bills she currently has so she can't certainly pay them. Her credit is going down the drain.
Now . . . even if she gets a good promotion, can quit her part-time job, and start going back to school, she still won't be able to go back because she has crappy credit and won't be able to get additional student loans. The only way she could go back to school is to get a job that would pay enough to live, pay her debt, and pay her school off . . . which seems unlikely without a bachelors degree.
The poor stay poor, and the rich stay rich. We don't all have the same opportunities handed to us and even if there are a few Naruto's out there that never loose hope and succeed at conquering the social oppression against them, the majority of these people stay right where they are. Class mobility is still an issue in our country. We aren't India mind you . . . but it still exists. Unfortunately in our country class mobility very often ties itself to race issues.
Edit: I wanted to include a few research and opinion articles on the subject if you're truly interested:
Rich-Poor Gap: Remarks by Alan Greenspan
EPRP: What Research Says About Unequal Funding for Schools in America [This one is my personal favorite. You have to download the pdf.]
An Economic Perspective on Urban Education
@cosmicenema. While your anecdote is just that, an anecdote, I do want to point one thing out. Why is a woman who is unable to afford an education, and has bad credit, having two children? It was her choice to have those two children. If she had chosen to not have those children, she would probably already have a degree and a higher paying job. I'm not making a general statement about class mobility here. I'll let the New York Times with their sciencey numbers take care of that. I just want to say that many people of all classes are blaming outside forces such as the government, video games, and schools for the consequences of their own poor decisions. If you have two kids you can't afford, you have nobody to blame but yourself for your situation.
Hypothetically, let's say we give every person the opportunity to go to college once they graduate from highschool . . . for free. Regardless of the other consequences this may have for society (college is the new highschool), what about the person who chose not to go to school at that time? The system for adults trying to change their life around also has design flaws. Just fixing primary schooling doesn't mean the solution is complete. I don't think most people would argue that your average 18 year old person is the wisest of people.
You'll notice I'm not trying to offer solutions here, I'm not sure there is one beyond a great shift in a specific meme of our culture: the myth of social mobility. The "American Dream" is not just white picket fences and 2.5 children . . . it's the rag-to-riches story. This isn't uniquely American, but it is specifically American. This meme is so ingrained in our culture that any time you bring up conversations like this, the responses you get are knee-jerk: "if he/she had not chosen xyz, then he/she wouldn't be in this situation". While this statement is often times true, it doesn't have to imply that he/she is stuck with their path in life at this point. This meme places blame on the individual. It is just as dangerous to place sole blame on the individual as it is solely on the system. As with all case studies, you need context.
I'm no idealist who thinks I know the perfect system; I'm not trying to say the system can't evolve; I do think we can educate our population to break a meme or archetype that is unhealthy, and to see problems that are often times invisible when seen through the lens of these archetypes. I think affirmative action and laws like the ones mentioned in the first post are logical evolutions of laws that segregate blacks from whites, but they're no longer appropriate.
My best friend is a sociologist and researches classes a bit but he also researches the conspiracy theory's so we rant about the subject in our 'crew' a lot. We're working on a name for our crew by the way . . . something as cool as front row crew hopefully.
I would not want to be a single parent and I know quite a few. How did she become a single mom with two kids? Was she walking around outside and some guy just sort of "slipped and fell" into her?
Why did she "choose" to go to a school she could not afford?
The rich stay rich because they understand economics and the value of money. The poor stay poor because they do not. Too many "poor" people are materialistic and believe that having stuff will bring them comfort and self-worth. To become rich you must first understand the difference between a need and a want.
Automobile, need or want? For those who do not live in big metro areas it is a need. Even though it is a need a cheap car can satisfy that need, you don't "need" to buy some $40K monstrosity, that is a want.
Food, need or want? Food is clearly a need. You need food to live. Eating out all the time and buying fancy cuts of meat is a want. Billions of people in China get by just fine with rice as a staple of their diet, you can do it in this country too.
The list goes on and on.
Ideally you want equal opportunity for all people no matter where or how they were born. However, if someone squanders their opportunity and learns their lesson after it's too late to easily escape, I'm not so sure if the society should bail them out somehow. It is very sad, and it seems unfair, that people who get into these situations are unable to escape despite their best efforts. Though, I do fear what kind of irresponsible people we will become if our government goes around alleviating the consequences of our personal choices, even when those consequences would be otherwise inescapable.
I think we need to decide on how many chances we want to offer people in life and under what circumstances. Currently we offer just one chance at minimum. This often ends in tragedy as people who make one mistake are never given the opportunity to take advantage of the lessons they have learned. However, if we remove the consequences even once, the lesson might not be learned.
I now understand the title of the comic "A Lesson is Learned, but the Damage is Irreversible".
Arguing the specifics of the anecdote won't work in this case. We're talking about a population in aggregate. If you're trying to say that American's, in aggregate, make poor choices about cars, babies, food, television . . . then yes. I would agree with you. My solution to that is still the same . . . create opportunities not through physical quotas, but through true education.
Historically, the disadvantage that African-Americans had in our society was attributable to the legacy of slavery and ongoing racism.
At what point, though, do you draw the line and say that the causation is too far removed from the problem? In other words, at what point do you start pointing the finger at the African-American community?
To be frank, I don't know the answer. I do know, however, that certain segments of the African-American community need to change if the community as a whole wants to succeed. Every community has its undesirable elements, but why is it that African-Americans seem to be lagging so far behind? The simple truth is that the last 20 years or so has brought an incredible amount of opportunity for African-Americans. I know many good schools and companies that were desperate for qualified African-Americans. Yet why do we still see so many African-Americans afflicted with the same problems? When do you start looking at the individual and blame them for not taking advantage of opportunities?
Have African-Americans had countless injustices thrust upon them? Absolutely. Nonetheless, this does not absolve a culture from pulling themselves up to overcome those injustices. The opportunities are out there now...
My belief is that the only intervention that's going to make a difference is early intervention. What good is fixing up a high school to a girl who dropped out of school at age 13 because she got pregnant? Even then, the intervention should come from the African-American community itself. What good will a bunch of rich, suburban, liberal white kids going to do in the ghetto? Why should African-American kids be expected to relate to those people? What we need is a movement of African-Americans who are willing to put history behind them and are willing to lead by example. Show the kid in the ghetto that it's possible to get out.
Now as one final point... I've had a lot of experience working in the field of poverty. One fundamental rule of poverty is that those who are afflicted by it often have a completely different value structure. There is some very interesting research in this field that shows us that our traditional methods of combating poverty may be way off base.