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Pondering race again
Feb. 11th, 2007 11:56 amI'm still reading "Learning While Black" and as the author details all the ways in which teachers expect parents to a) take responsibility for the child's learning and b) provide extra training/tutors etc in high performance schools, but don't tell the parents this, leaving the parent to wonder why their kid isn't learning math in school as fast as the kids who have extra training 5+ hours a week from mom and a paid tutor with their own master's degree, this is what's coming to my mind:
I'm thinking back over my mother's rather bizarre educational experiences in the early 1970s and late 1960s, as the educational system changed its standards again and again, and I'm thinking about white flight to suburbs and then to private schools, and I'm wondering -
Did the "establishment" aka "them" (aka if you happen to be white and roughly middle class or above, "us") deliberately BREAK public schooling in order to prevent black kids from getting access to any real education after Brown v. Board?
Because I went to decent schools with small class size, yet I vividly remember: my mom taught me how to read over the summer, before that I was below grade level and barely getting a few words. My mom taught me my times tables, before that I wasn't getting them; after that I could do long division. My mom taught me negative and positive numbers. My mom exposed me to the classics, to poetry, to fantasy, to mythology. I didn't really get a whole lot of my major educational experiences from school. School was just a box I got stored in for a long time, until I started taking collegiate level math classes as a high school sophomore/junior, really.
So what happens to kids who don't have my mom? Or don't have the mom who's writing this "Learning While Black" book, who knows all the psych speak and can afford to take two days off work to observe her kid in school and write a literate memo to the teachers about the situation? Can anybody really learn real literacy and numeracy from public school without supplemental work these days?
I'm thinking back over my mother's rather bizarre educational experiences in the early 1970s and late 1960s, as the educational system changed its standards again and again, and I'm thinking about white flight to suburbs and then to private schools, and I'm wondering -
Did the "establishment" aka "them" (aka if you happen to be white and roughly middle class or above, "us") deliberately BREAK public schooling in order to prevent black kids from getting access to any real education after Brown v. Board?
Because I went to decent schools with small class size, yet I vividly remember: my mom taught me how to read over the summer, before that I was below grade level and barely getting a few words. My mom taught me my times tables, before that I wasn't getting them; after that I could do long division. My mom taught me negative and positive numbers. My mom exposed me to the classics, to poetry, to fantasy, to mythology. I didn't really get a whole lot of my major educational experiences from school. School was just a box I got stored in for a long time, until I started taking collegiate level math classes as a high school sophomore/junior, really.
So what happens to kids who don't have my mom? Or don't have the mom who's writing this "Learning While Black" book, who knows all the psych speak and can afford to take two days off work to observe her kid in school and write a literate memo to the teachers about the situation? Can anybody really learn real literacy and numeracy from public school without supplemental work these days?
