The fact we must be insulated from any offense and assumed too infantile to handle obvious truths has always been to me a source of vexation; equality will always remain unreachable and I can't imagine any good coming from that phenomenon.
The fact we must be insulated from any offense and assumed too infantile to handle obvious truths has always been to me a source of vexation; equality will always remain unreachable and I can’t imagine any good coming from that phenomenon.
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And in the schools, there is what G.W. Bush referred to as the “soft bigotry of low expectations”. While I was teaching, I witnessed this first hand.
This attitude among the administrators was not confined to the black kids during my time teaching in a public school, aka my year in hell. In that school, most of the trouble came from about 10% of the white kids. When I had a social worker at the school tell me about these trashy white kids, “You can’t expect them to live according to your middle class values,” I said, “How elitist is that?”
Such attitudes at that school extended to all of the students, regardless of race. But for fear of being called “racist”, many administrators and some teachers let the black kids and the hispanic kids slide somewhat. Who benefitted from that? The kids and society were short-changed, while some educator got one less headache and escaped an hour or so of paper work and follow-up.
For most of my career, I had too few colleagues who shared my belief that part of our job was to civilize our students. When I insisted on being called “ma’am” or would not allow a student to answer me with “yeah”, for example, I was viewed by some as priggish, I suspect. But I felt it was important to teach the kids manners.