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Don't miss the point just because a 13 year old did: Our lack of dedication to equal access to quality education is putting a generation at risk of being, essen

Don't miss the point just because a 13 year old did: Our lack of dedication to equal access to quality education is putting a generation at risk of being, essentially, enslaved. She made this about race, but it's about class (and by extension about race, because of America's unfortunate race/class relationship).

potatolicious 14y ago
Her reasoning is still very specious - there's a very, very big difference between oppression as an unintended consequence of systemic failure, and a deliberate manipulation of the system into oppressing its people. Her teachers responded in the poorest way possible, but I can see why: they were just accused not only of being giant failures at their jobs, but also of failing deliberately for the sake of racism. Even if we swapped "race" with "class" here, her comments are still inflammatory, unsubstantiated, and shockingly mean-spirited/cruel coming from a 13 year-old. If I were at the receiving end of that kind of accusation, I'd be pretty pissed. There are more than enough instances of deliberate and willful racism in this country that we really shouldn't have to grasp at straws like this.
- tomasien 14y ago
  Grasping at straws about racism in the American Education system? That's grasping at straws? I agree it's not actually, wholly, about race, but it's clearly a massive issue that is willfully ignored by the public at large. You wouldn't BELIEVE what the majority minority (and again, I really do believe that's more of a consequence of old systems than current ones) public schools are like in my hometown of Richmond, VA. They're not even really schools.
- Kroem3r 14y ago
  Wow. That's some comment. Hard to know where to start to unpack it. You must have been having a lousy day. It's probably not cool to tag the result of the essay, and by extension, the girl, as "cruel", etc. You're just short of blaming the victim. And the discount is based on a technicality. Analyzing the output of a black box delivering some awful result: If the same result could be delivered for some range of inputs, they're all effectively equal. And as the recipient of that result, a person is well-served to point out the equivalence. More to the point, it's eminently fair to make this observation in public. This I understand to be more than minimally in keeping with freedom of speech. Saying that you believe that there are plenty of real issues in the country is not a pretext for dismissing, nor does it provide some kind of legitimacy to a dismissal of the case the child made.
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    > "You're just short of blaming the victim." How am I blaming the victim? Is she actually the victim of a cabal of racist teachers who are deliberately and willfully exercising a racist policy of keeping minorities uneducated? The problem here isn't that she has pointed out the many structural problems infecting the US public education system, it's that she didn't, and instead she pointed at her own teachers as her direct, deliberate, and willful oppressors - which is patently incorrect. The problem here is I think some people like yourself are reading her essay as "The quality of the public education system in minority-heavy areas of the US is shockingly bad and perpetuates the economic and social disparity between white America and everyone else, and this continuing disparity is very much racism in action". That's entirely a valid observation and completely fair to point out. Instead her essay was "The bad quality of the education I have personally received is a consequence of a direct and willful conspiracy by my immediate teachers to oppress minorities and withhold education from them." These are two entirely different arguments. If she had actually made the former argument I'd be cheering her on the entire way, but no, she went way off the rails and proceeding to heap incredulous accusations on quite possibly the only people in the system who could possibly have an interest in ameliorating the broken system.
coldarchon 14y ago
Honestly I think you miss the point about education. If you are given a chance and you fail, it's not the teachers fault they didn't motivate you enough. Life is not a pony stable ..

potatolicious 14y ago

Her reasoning is still very specious - there's a very, very big difference between oppression as an unintended consequence of systemic failure, and a deliberate manipulation of the system into oppressing its people. Her teachers responded in the poorest way possible, but I can see why: they were just accused not only of being giant failures at their jobs, but also of failing deliberately for the sake of racism. Even if we swapped "race" with "class" here, her comments are still inflammatory, unsubstantiated, and shockingly mean-spirited/cruel coming from a 13 year-old. If I were at the receiving end of that kind of accusation, I'd be pretty pissed. There are more than enough instances of deliberate and willful racism in this country that we really shouldn't have to grasp at straws like this.

tomasien 14y ago
Grasping at straws about racism in the American Education system? That's grasping at straws? I agree it's not actually, wholly, about race, but it's clearly a massive issue that is willfully ignored by the public at large. You wouldn't BELIEVE what the majority minority (and again, I really do believe that's more of a consequence of old systems than current ones) public schools are like in my hometown of Richmond, VA. They're not even really schools.
Kroem3r 14y ago
Wow. That's some comment. Hard to know where to start to unpack it. You must have been having a lousy day. It's probably not cool to tag the result of the essay, and by extension, the girl, as "cruel", etc. You're just short of blaming the victim. And the discount is based on a technicality. Analyzing the output of a black box delivering some awful result: If the same result could be delivered for some range of inputs, they're all effectively equal. And as the recipient of that result, a person is well-served to point out the equivalence. More to the point, it's eminently fair to make this observation in public. This I understand to be more than minimally in keeping with freedom of speech. Saying that you believe that there are plenty of real issues in the country is not a pretext for dismissing, nor does it provide some kind of legitimacy to a dismissal of the case the child made.
- potatolicious 14y ago
  > "You're just short of blaming the victim." How am I blaming the victim? Is she actually the victim of a cabal of racist teachers who are deliberately and willfully exercising a racist policy of keeping minorities uneducated? The problem here isn't that she has pointed out the many structural problems infecting the US public education system, it's that she didn't, and instead she pointed at her own teachers as her direct, deliberate, and willful oppressors - which is patently incorrect. The problem here is I think some people like yourself are reading her essay as "The quality of the public education system in minority-heavy areas of the US is shockingly bad and perpetuates the economic and social disparity between white America and everyone else, and this continuing disparity is very much racism in action". That's entirely a valid observation and completely fair to point out. Instead her essay was "The bad quality of the education I have personally received is a consequence of a direct and willful conspiracy by my immediate teachers to oppress minorities and withhold education from them." These are two entirely different arguments. If she had actually made the former argument I'd be cheering her on the entire way, but no, she went way off the rails and proceeding to heap incredulous accusations on quite possibly the only people in the system who could possibly have an interest in ameliorating the broken system.

coldarchon 14y ago

Honestly I think you miss the point about education. If you are given a chance and you fail, it's not the teachers fault they didn't motivate you enough. Life is not a pony stable ..