and War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength...
Posted on 03/23/2008 6:31:48 PM PDT by river rat
Latinos’ Education Failure is Their Own Fault!
Latinos score lower than whites on tests and drop-out of school more often and it is largely their fault!!!! The same goes for Black American youth! Wow!!! That was risky. One can get fired for saying such things. So to cover my buns let me just clarify that nothing in this paragraph had anything to do with race. Culture, not I.Q. or innate ability, explains this discrepancy. And if you really want to minimize the achievement gap between Latinos, Asians, Whites and Blacks, you should read on.
Fifth graders in Taipei, Taiwan spend an average of 13 hours a week on homework; their counterparts in Minneapolis spend slightly more than four hours a week on homework. In Asian cultures not having completed one's homework normally results in shame. Completing your homework is positively associated with academic success. Cultural differences provide a complete and satisfactory explanation as to why students in Asian countries do better at math.
The concept that racism plays any part in the achievement gap comes from the twisted logic of education professionals. As much as anything, their thought patterns create the disparity. Educators' fealty to multiculturalism makes us unable to do anything but praise cultural diversity. Yet, at heart, these multicultural educators take cultural diversity to be very shallow. They cannot imagine that it could be so important as to impact something as fundamental as study habits or the love of education. After discounting culture as a factor, the educators correctly discount innate ability as a factor. And from here on the errors of their assumptions lead to more and more destructive conclusions.
After discounting culture and race as possible sources of the achievement gap, the education professionals still have to find a culprit. Their solution? Institutional racism. This means that the achievement gap becomes proof of schools being racist. The other cause cited is poverty. But since this cannot have anything to do with culture or race, this explanation becomes proof that society is racist.
Teaching the youth of your country that your society is unjust and racist is something no culture that wanted to survive would ever do. Beyond endangering our society, though, it fosters anti-social behavior in youth. Would you work to fit into a racist society in which you have no hope of success? This attitude pervading the education environment largely explains why so many Black American youth consider studying to be "acting white" and giving in to "the man."
To help, we need to be willing to take a culturist point of view, to consider that culture might in fact be able to impact achievement. Such an explanation would reinstate the vital connection between merit and achievement. Culturist interpretations of the achievement gap can prompt cultures to take a good hard look at themselves. Meetings and community based solutions - such as tutoring centers - could then be discussed as solutions. The culturist perspective has the merit of better reflecting reality than saying schools are racist against Latinos and Blacks, but not Asians and Whites. Beyond this, it is much more likely to motivate students and close the achievement gap than calling schools and society racist.
John Press is an adjunct professor at New York University.
Yeah, right....
Interesting article.
But odd web site - did you see this?
>>Whiteness Studies: Understanding Culture or Promoting Hate?
Prof. John Press - 2/13/2008
Culturists and other Americans should all know about whiteness studies because they command a lot of respect in academia’s humanities departments. <<
I thought maybe it was a Nazi site but they are fanatically pro-Israel...
The difference between some (maybe most) Latino groups and all other immigrant groups? The other immigrant groups strongly encouraged their children to learn and use English, even if they did pick up the mother tongue around the house.
Amazing. You learn something new here everyday.
Yep.... I’ve had the site bookmarked for some time..
One can ALWAYS find a thought provoking article...
Some are weird, most are interesting and fresh approaches to old problems..
I like to read there late in the evening, after a few adult beverages....
Our own children - and in turn, their children were raised in bilingual homes...
Greek or French was spoken by all at home..
Once the front door is exited — ENGLISH is the language in America.
In our current neighborhood - we have MANY immigrant families raising their 1st generation of Americans...
In the yards and parties — one can hear everything from Farsi, to Japanese, Chinese, German, Korean and even the Kings English as spoken by the finest Englishwomen....
BUT -— all the adults and children speak ENGLISH when addressing neighbors on the sidewalk and in public.
For the older folks - it may not be perfect English - but by God it’s ENGLISH.
ANYONE who fails to get educated in this country is at fault.
Anyone’s failure to get an education is largely their own fault. It’s there for the taking.
True...
But I would add there are many schools a student could attend, complete all the work, get high grades and “graduate” an idiot..
The unfortunate truth, is there are too many schools “indoctrinating” NOT educating -— while teaching revisionist history, junk science tied to leftist politics and propaganda....
I’ve been horrified more than once - trying to hold a conversation with 18 to 19 year olds......
Sadly - too many are semi-functional morons, with a high school diploma..
Let’s don’t even get into a discussion of what we call College Graduates...
“Fifth graders in Taipei, Taiwan spend an average of 13 hours a week on homework....” Where are their parents while all this studying is going on? I bet they are with their children. Nothing we do to solve our public education mess will work until parents become part of the process. How is it parents can watch their children go through thirteen-fourteen years of public school without noticing how little the kids learn? Parents aren’t responsible for their children’s education. That is left up to the public schools, and when the kids come home with homework, ...well, that’s between them and their teachers. Sorry, tutoring centers might help a few kids. Most school districts have access to numerous tutoring programs that are funded by federal and state grants. Most kids don’t want to be bothered with them, and most parents don’t care. The more Hispanic parents don’t care, and the more they let their children get caught up in the race wars trip, the more Hispanic children will drop out. The same goes for white kids, black kids and even yellow kids.
I sincerely doubt that!
Parents haven't destroyed the Public School System -- The Teacher's Unions and politicians pandering to special interests have done far more to destroyed the system.
The biggest problem, as I see it - is with the children who make up the approx. 70% born to unwed mothers and the untold number belonging to non English speaking and for the most part illiterate or uneducated illegal immigrants...
I doubt "parental involvement" is what is need in these cases.
What is NEEDED is an educational regimen taught in ENGLISH in a DISCIPLINED ENVIRONMENT, where disrupters are expelled and failures are FAILED until they get it..
Reducing the "bar" to allow the lowest common denominator to succeed - teaching courses to convey "self esteem" and pandering to bilingual demands has effectively taken our schools out of the education business and into the childcare and warehousing business.
and War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength...
The culture encourages this or that but... race correlates with culture more strongly than any other factor that can be named.
Does that make this racism?
Or realism?
John Press has the latitude to write this because NYC and environs are becoming less and less African-American, and less and less US born Caucasian American.
When you have 150+ cultures living together with their children in public schools, and only a few subcultures are failing continuously generation after generation, and where new arrivals coming from homelands where there was no electric, plumbing, or schooling are consistently outperforming the established cultures, it gets hard for the multicultural cult to continue their shrill screeds.
For many years now it has become more and more obvious : american indians, african blacks, latinos...are essentially right brian types, artistic and emotion-driven. Little or no left brain development, that engineering computer that is the filter for right brain output. Or, the right brain child-artist proposes the genius idea, the adult-engineer disposes of the idea as impractical.
We see this in the japanese, extreme left brain development and not enough right brain imagination. The germans are similar in their mechanical culture.
What you refer to here then is obvious, the lack of left brain development in american indians, blacks, latinos is inherent, DNA-based. A simple example : when the spanish conquered mexico, the only “wheel” they had was a spinning can on a stick, a child’s toy. If that was the only “wheel” latinos could invent BY THEMSELVES....
no its “the man’s” fault
Japanese in the United States have a slightly lower rate of homicide than Japanese in Japan, despite the availability of guns in the U.S., for example.
It is hard to become a lawyer like on TV if you’ve dropped out of high school to become a construction worker. It’s not possible to become a doctor like on ER if you haven’t learned to read or to speak English.
Yet stating such when someone says there aren’t enough Hispanic professionals is racist. If it mattered, they’d drag their kids back to school and keep them there.
“What is NEEDED is an educational regimen taught in ENGLISH in a DISCIPLINED ENVIRONMENT, where disrupters are expelled and failures are FAILED until they get it.”
Most schools in the US do teach their classes in English. Try expelling every undisciplined kid who acts up in a classroom, and see how quick the school board comes down on you. But think about what you are saying. Whose fault is it that teachers spend an hour dealing with discipline problems for every hour they teach. Who should be teaching children how to behave, and respect teachers? Show me a kid who has parents that take responsibility for his education, and I’ll show you a kid who learns. My kids were all home schooled, and they’ve done well. A lot of people can’t home school or afford private schools. They are forced to depend on the public schools, but not forced to quit their responsibility for their kid’s education, though most of them do. Parents who take responsibility for their kids educations don’t need to blame teachers for their kid’s failures.
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