Acting White: Soft Bigotry of Hyped Expectations?

There is a soft bigotry in America where we do not speak the painful truth if doing so touches close to historical sensitivities, especially around race. It is acceptable for large groups of color to languish in silence, just as long as we can pretend that we are all the same. To this I say BS!

I am becoming a firm believer of the philosophy of telling kids and parents, sooner rather than later, what will happen to them if they are reckless with their opportunity for an education. They will be labeled stupid and their lives will pretty much suck. The potential for this ugly and inevitable labeling will spur some to go all-out to prove the labelers wrong – and this will be a good start. It will also set the stage for alternative education scenarios, away from the failure of a one-size-fits-all-curriculum's. I’m not advocating telling a kid that he is too dumb to read, but the current approach of telling him that anyone can read, anytime they want, seems to give him the power to ignore the urgency of the goal, as if he is hurting you the instructor, or society, more than himself when he fails.

Twice in the last thirty days I have visited a local urban high school classroom that has some amazingly bright kids (mostly girls), of the ones that bother to show up. The teacher asked me if I wanted more kids to attend our sessions, for the time I am investing. I said no, because I do not want her wasting her time rounding up kids who do not want to attend school. So instead of begging the slackers, and telling them that they are just as smart, if they apply themselves, I think we should tell them the truth – that they are under-achievers and should prepare themselves for manual labor at lower pay, if they are lucky enough to find it. Not only should they be told they are average or below, they should have a learning track to match their demonstrated abilities, instead of funding wasted college-prep educational capacity.

Telling the entire range of kids that they can do anything, go anywhere, better fits some ideal notion, where everybody lands on the planet equally endowed, rather than what we see in a real classroom. We tell black kids that they can be astronauts, while arriving at the school bell, at all, is their biggest accomplishment of the school day. From the start, we should tell them, and their caregivers, that not showing up ready to learn insures failure, and the school will not hesitate to treat a student as such if the behavior merits this. We must also stop accepting kids who come to school with no intention to learn, but rather to disrupt.

Not being truthful with kids, for fear of dissuading them, is wrongheaded. These kids know bullshit. What they need is the truth, no matter how painful some soft-bigot psychologist thinks it is. If we listen to the teachers, the kids and parents with perseverance show up regardless of obstacles, external and internal, and sometimes because of them. The kids who are not motivated should have the chance to excel at any moment, but opportunities should be driven by results. Otherwise we end up with school districts of advanced placement (AP) classes supplemented by overflowing special-education bunkers, where future DNGs (did not graduate) are warehoused until truancy laws no longer apply.

I know this sounds harsh, but the kids I see hanging around the school building and the streets are tough and need straight talk and straight learning, not educational pie-in-the-sky.

James C. Collier

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