Over at the (very) nominally conservative web site Washington Examiner they have an opinion piece titled To Save Black Children, Abolish Teachers Unions. The post serves as a great example of BigCon siding with the left on all of their talking points in order to try and score points against a political enemy (in this case teacher’s unions).
Now, there’s A LOT wrong with that article, but it boils down to the turn of phrase “Accidents of birth” used in the article. Does the writer really believe that? That there is no difference between his own kid and that of some stranger? The fact that he cites absolutely nothing to back up his claim that teacher’s unions are the cause of failed schools makes the whole article even more hollow.
Of course facts don’t matter much in this regard, just “feeling” and the feeling goes that with just the correct inputs any racial group can achieve whatever any other racial group desires to achieve. Never mind that they’ve been playing with the stupid inputs for decades to no avail (blacks haven’t been turned into whites, and whites haven’t been turned into Koreans, not that anyone even asked if they desired to do so). And what do they hope to achieve, what does the author of the Washington Examiner piece hope will happen by eliminating teacher unions? The writer points out that “[Failed Baltimore city schools] actually got 50% more funding than the world’s widely agreed-to-be-best school system in the world, in Finland“.
Let’s…first ignore the fact that he fails to mention that teachers in Finland are also unionized. Beyond that, is it his contention that if we switched the students in Baltimore with those in Finland that the black American students will succeed and the Finnish students will fail? Does anyone actually believe such a thing? Well, yes they do obviously, but still isn’t it easier to believe that it’s not funding, or teachers, or administrators that make a school “bad”, but that it’s the students, and by extension, the parents (and their parents and so on)? That’s even sitting aside the possible fact that both groups are getting what they desire from the system that they use (thus muddying the idea of “failing” and “succeeding”).
An additional quibble along those lines, blank slate-ism is flat out demeaning to higher achieving people (and it’s meant to be). Do Chinese students succeed because they go to school on Saturday? Or is it because they are descended from generations of people who prioritized such achievements? Are (native) German engineers the result of some trade school program, or thousands of years of efforts to make a better people? It’s just insulting to say that “magic dirt” is all it takes in order to make a people that are more likely to be exceptional, rather than the long history of efforts by their ancestors to make a better people.