“The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School†(Grand Central Publishing) is Boland’s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public-schoolteacher, and it’s riveting.
There’s nothing dry or academic here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system that seems broken beyond repair.
Whatever. I’m sure those big city liberals several thousand miles away will solve their dazzling urbanite problems eventually.
I didn’t read it. I have best friends who have taught in gang schools. I know these stories. I’ve seen the de civilization that goes on due to political correctness. We need a new MLK, and he doesn’t need to be any certain race. We need someone to risk his life making speeches that wake people up to the worst prejudice of all, that of low expectations.
When civilization shares space with feral animals, really smart ones, civilization has to win or we lose it altogether. If the meme is that civilization is bad and racist, and wild greedy lusts are respected, then civilization is on the way out.
We need to choose: behaving like the worst of primates or the best of them. There are species of primate that can’t even make tools. Laws and rules are tools just as leaves and bones can be. We need to expect a higher level of civility for all or we need some pretty painful consequences.
Affirmative action for poor people (of all stripes) must be conjoined with strong ignorance of those who don’t choose the leg ups. Schools must be for willing students, or... There IS no school. Public behavior must be polite and decent or.... You will be fined or jailed. Laws must not be broken or.... The punishment will fit the crime and it will stick, no easy ways out any more. No free lunches. You can’t feed your kids, they starve to death or a kind charity steps in. I love charities, because someone being helped can feel gratitude and also enough of a debt that they push themselves more to pay it back.
We should expect kindness in public from an older white lady and a younger black man and a middle aged Hispanic. It should not matter. As it stands today, if I’m entering a building behind someone, I KNOW the older white person will hold that door for me. I am pretty sure the young white person will, but they sometimes disappoint. I KNOW the young black person will NOT hold the door nor even appear to think about it. At least not in CA. They probably do in the South except Atlanta. Sadly, no matter the age of the middle easterner or Hispanic, the doors will not be held.
It’s time to bring back reform schools.