Posted by
C. L. Palmer on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 2:36:57 PM
As a teacher, I'm always hearing about the supposed "educational achievement gap." This is supposed to make me feel guilty that certain ethnic groups are doing worse (on average) than others. However, from my vantage point, those numbers are extremely deceptive. In short, they tell a story far removed from what actually goes on in a classroom.
The gaps that actually exist are cultural, not racial. They stem from a family and neighborhood culture which undervalues achievement, or at least the effort required to produce it. The cultures to which I refer are the "trash" cultures, those whose practitioners frequently appear on programs such as Maury Povich or Jerry Springer. Sure, they'd all love to acquire wealth. However, they do not promote those social and moral values which, in real life, lead to it. Students who come from a trash culture often behave in a belligerent manner regardless of the stimuli in their surroundings. They are taught to be bellicose by nature, oppositional to structure and authority. Whatever an authority figure tells them is suspect by nature, and their gut instinct is to resist. They are loud and quarrelsome. This holds true across lines of color and nationality; it's just as true in a ghetto, a barrio, or a trailer park.
We don't suffer from endemic racism. We suffer from a surplus of negative cultural baggage. This baggage is, of course, passed from parent to child in a line of wasted potential that creates what appear to be racial differences, but are, in fact, simply based on patterns of behavior. As I've told many a student, there is no such thing as a baggy pants gene. Those neighborhood and community affectations which impede achievement are learned, and can be unlearned. This, however, will not happen until we rid ourselves of two very foolish ideas.
The first idea is the equation of race and culture. Anyone who has studied sociology knows very well that for each race, there are nigh infinite cultures and subcultures. There is no such thing as the black culture, or the white culture, etc. Europe alone has a wide variety of individual cultures in a relatively small geographic area, and thus serves as a simple refutation of the nonsense the American media perpetuate, asserting that blacks are inherently culturally different from whites, as are Asians and Hispanics as well. This is nonsense. What cultural differences do exists are trends, not absolutes, and result from a mixture of national origin and family dynamics. Thus it is that third generation immigrants have generally been absorbed into the cultural mainstream, regardless of where their grandparents came from.
The second ridiculous notion is the idea that all cultures are equal, or at least that they are all equally valid. This is obviously false as well. To argue from the extreme, the Nazis had a unique culture, with its own cosmology and belief system. Was that a valid culture? Should it, and the implications which flow from it, have been tolerated? Did we make a huge sociological mistake in defeating Nazi culture, and subsequently stigmatizing its expression? Of course not. The same, obviously, is true of the trash cultures. They produce negative results when put into practice. They have led to mass poverty, vice, and ignorance. Trash cultures must be eradicated for the benefit of those future generations who would otherwise be destroyed by them.
The inferences made in The Bell Curve ignored the effects of culture on intelligence. This becomes obvious when one realizes that no measurement was made of white trash culture. I believe that had such a breakdown been made in the data, the results would have been deracialized, while still angering many. No one wants to believe that any group he belongs to is somehow inferior, even if that group is simply one of culture and habit, and is therefore maleable. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would still have howled, but the authors of the study could have credibly maintained that no racism was involved.
My best and brightest students have always been a racially diverse group. I've never taught a gifted class without at least one student from every race. However, the thing that all of them have had in common is culture. Their parents have all belonged to cultures that value achievement. Thus, their children achieve. If we can somehow get the lawmakers to comprehend this simple fact, and to work toward a solution, we'll never have to compare our students by race again. Considering the fact that many students are racially mixed these days anyway, race seems something of a moot point in the modern era. We may finally be on the verge of overcoming discrimination, for the simple fact that we'll all be in the same boat.