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Black focused schools - A huge step ahead.
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You know the recent Denzel Washington movie, The Great Debaters? It's about Wiley College. I worked at their hospital for four years, in Marshall, Tx. The town's got about a 65% black population, almost all at or below the poverty line.
Plus, my dad runs a government housing project in nearby Longview. I'd say his clientèle is somewhere between 99 and 100 percent black.
I've got a little experience in the arena.
Sure, but how does that actually happen in a practical way that-
a) doesn't ostracize black kids with the aforementioned affect of peer opinion, and
b) doesn't leave out the other ethnicities that integrate into that school system?
Wishing doesn't make it so. And too much positivity patronizes within short order.
I gotta nod in agreement with this one. But that starts early. Teenagers are too forgone with apathy and distraction by the time high school rolls around if they haven't been conditioned to become intellectual in prior levels of education. But DuBois is stuff young black kids need to hear. He and his contemporaries, at the time of extreme enforced illiteracy and anti-intellectualism, better articulated the black struggle and the foundations for restoration than (sadly) anyone since. I loved the way those writers turned their anger into plans of action instead of laments over victimization.
Ultimately whether or not the school fails or flies depends entirely on how well-prepared they are to handle, well, everything we've been talking about.
I also think you're underestimating teenagers, but I have no evidence of that. Teenagers who didn't used to care might begin to care given a curriculum more relevant to their everyday experience, and teachers who aren't predisposed to insist they're dumb or average.
I do think parents who send their kids to this school will be the parents who value education, so there's a good chance that their kids do too.
By that token, wouldn't the resulting assumed higher GPAs be worthless as a scientific example? The control is tainted.
And again, by that token, those are the same kids that would likely do well in a typical school. Purely anecdotal, but I can't imagine that there are too many brainy intellectual blacks teens who are dropping out because they don't hear enough about Frederick Douglass.
I just read a fairly long article about how the whole Asian 'model minority' thing was a huge myth. Granted, it was old, and doubtless the situation of Asian-Americans has improved since then, but the points it made were:
1) Asian Americans appear to have disproportionately high income because they overwhelmingly live in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, and Los Angeles. Once you adjust for location, they, much like other minorities, make less than whites.
2) Asian American immigrants come in already equipped with a hugely disproportionate amount of PhDs, and this statistically skews their group income and life prospects upwards. If you focus on native-born Asian Americans, the statistics look much worse.
3) Although Asian Americans' tend to pursue higher education, their education still doesn't go as far as whites', namely, even post-college they are much more likely to operate small businesses (laundromats, groceries), or do low-status technical work (office machine technician) than to receive higher-status careers (business management) that whites with comparable credentials will.
So yeah, I don't know about this "if you worked hard like the Asians you'd do well" thing. Seems like a disingenuous view of Asian success was widely popularized as a way to tell other minorities to suck it, despite the realities of racism in both cases.
Exactly AR. This is the attitude people lack nowadays. How long can a person complain about the status quo, without inacting some type of change?
Plus, all the lamenting over, perceived and actual, victimization creates 'a boy cried wolf' outside perspective. That's just one more obstacle for those few that do actively pursue change.
Bottom line: first hand experience is the best way to garner information about the situation and deduce conclusions. Without that, it's all just speculation: intelligent deductions, but not neccesarily accurate.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
My first post was on this very subject. Page 6 of this thread. That was my original point.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
I've long been a fan of DuBois and Langston Hughes and their contemporaries. Their writing solely concerns rights regarding the human condition and how to come about taking them back for themselves. It's inspirational, not self-pitying. It's calls to action, not requests for intervention. It's instruction, not destruction.
A bit ambiguous, but I understand what you're after.
What we need is for 60 minutes to pull another pigmentation trick on the public.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
. . . and traded them in for more realistic dreams of being a drop out, going to jail, and/or dying in violent black-on-black crime?
I'll take grannie's dreams, any day.
Whatever the answer is, it's white people. It's always whitey.
Child Abuse Laws. They helped many families with abusive parents. Also stopped many a minority mother from physically putting the manners in their child.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
Do you happen to have a link to this?
What he said.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
It's "The Gap Between Striving and Achieving: The Case of Asian American Women" by Deborah Woo. I have the PDF, but I don't have the link, since I got it of a school site.
Edit: It's from '89
Half the aisle is actively trying to keep them down. The other half is actively trying to profit from them being kept down and using it as a false rallying cry.
Honestly, is the "blackness" really the problem they're encountering? I mean, yes, I know it used to be (and still is in a lot of ways), but I've seen this in my own background where people in my "home culture" apparently emphasized ignorance while others seemed to not be interested in anything I knew because, with my background, there was no way I could possibly be intellectual, because I was a bumpkin from Southeast Texas.
"Poor pride" and the foot in your face from The Man trying to keep you down isn't a uniquely black, brown, yellow, or white experience. It's a classist experience. Painting it as something else isn't helping the cause.
No one has mentioned a possible reason to explain the situation that is not embbeded in hate at its roots.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
Um, poverty?
We already covered that on like the first page. Poor people do shitty in school.
From my experience, that hasn't been a problem at all. Sadly, where I work, most of the regular day-to-day verbal and physical abuse I see is done by black mothers. Mind you, completely anecdotal, but it's been the case no matter where I worked.
The reason black kids have a 40% dropout rate isn't because the schools arn't afrocentric enough; it's because most blacks live in areas where the schools suck.
One of the reasons schools suck is because their focus has shifted from reading, writing, and arithmatic, to PC fluff and crap like this.
You don't need to have school prayer, "heather has 2 mommies", the 10 commandmants or this self-segregation in schools, you need schools that focus on teaching kids to read, write, and do math.
Thing is, the fluff is easier to teach and make you look oh so "progressive" and good, never mind that you're graduating kids that can't balance a checkbook....
Margaret Thatcher
I think most of the replies have been coming from an American perspective. If I am reading this quote right, and most of these kids are first or second generation immigrants to Canada, then yes having special programs for them does make a lot of sense.
Just as parents who never went to college have a hard time helping their kids get into colleges, parents from another country who have never been through the Canadian school system will probably have a hard time helping out their kids.
I am not convinced that a seperate school is the best way, but I can definitely understand that as a group these children may have different educational needs.
to wawkin: It does not always have to do with hate. Being part of a numerical minority in majority rules system often means you are simply ignored. This is more out of apathy than hatred. I am not saying that racism doesn't exist, just that even if all hatred was gone and we saw each other as brothers, minorities would still probably get fucked over.
Is this true?
And if so, why is this school suddenly such a huge deal?
stolen from a post regarding this subject from another forum:
So . . . the reason so many black kids drop out is because . . . . they're too respectful to the teachers?
Huh?
Natives get special schools because they've been fucked over more times and ways than any other group in the entire history of this country.
No, the reason that the teachers think that black kids are disrespectful, is because culturally, white people will look one another in the eyes, even when having an argument or being disciplined. Meanwhile, it is entirely possible, that the black children feel respect is being show by not looking eye-to-eye at the person disciplining them, it is a sign of deferrance and submission.
So the black child is trying to show deferrance and submission, the white authority figure is interpretting it as disrespect.
This leads to harsher punishment by the authority figure because they are punishing the disrespect on top of the original transgression. Which leads to black children being punished more harshley for the same infractions (in their eyes, I doubt the authority figure actually tells them that the extra punishment is for not looking them in the eyes).
If your being treated unfairly, then you are unlikely to continue to attend, which leads to dropout.
This is retarded. I come from a culture where looking someone in the eye is a sign of confrontation or disrespect (and is not afro or class - centric phenomenon), and when I was transplanted to US, this has never been an issue with my teachers. Yes, annecdotal evidence, but it is a really poor excuse/analogy, and treats teachers as if they are morons.
Well...
"If you can't do it, teach it."
Don't get me wrong, I have mad respect for teachers, but frankly, anyone with a modecum of cogniscience should be able to take a book and regurgitate it to an audience. I would retract this statement for any teacher that teaches a subject that requires understanding rather than just rote memory. However, even these subjects, pre-collegiate level, are taught in via rote memory methods (which i think only hinders the students later on in their education).
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
Yes, the system works.
That's funny on like, 6 different levels.
"This is where I say something profound and you bow, so lets just skip to your part."
I don't know what you're wanting. Arab, Indian, and many Hispanic cultures are much more militant in their beliefs regarding respect of elders, eye-contact, and so forth, yet all almost uniformly perform better in Western educational systems than Blacks. I don't know how you propose to "fix" the alleged Pygmalion effect, unless you start with the top, i.e., a system of black community leadership that concurrently seeks relaxed standards for minorities and wonders why their grades are so low.
One man's rationalization is another's excuse.
Although, on just a level of morbid curiosity, I'd love to see an actual experiment using regular black students in an all-black school taught by demanding all-black staff teaching an afro-centric curriculum. The results, positively or negatively, would essentially close the door on the argument.
Personally, I feel popular culture has more to do with declining educational statistics in black kids than anything else. The overwhelming majority of Black people in the media are football players, basketball players, comedians, and hip-hop artists. None of which require more than the most skeletal of educational foundations. Where's the incentive? Honestly, I played college ball with guys that honest-to-god could not even read, yet were passed along in their "kinesiology" programs wherein all the classes were taught by athletics staff. And sadly, growing up in the South, most the black kids who did perform well in school went on to throw their lives away with careers in the seminary services.