Every time I point out that the average American reading comprehension level is 7th to 10th grade people think I'm lying. But only 30% of Americans have college degrees. Our literacy rate is improving but it's not great https://t.co/7O9MnxdXg7
— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) October 26, 2021
When I was in junior high (in the 1960s), and starting to read about the first Gilded Age, I noticed one of the standard tropes of that era was the terror that ‘Real Americans’ — upper-class white Protestant men — were being ‘crowded out’ of Ivy League institutions by the lower orders, i.e., pushy urban Jews and even Irish Catholics. (‘Asiatics’ were, blessedly, being legislated out of American citizenship; Italians and Eastern Europeans were condemned as subhumans too ignorant even to aspire to higher education; and any mention of ‘the Negro’ was avoided as unnecessarily lacerating to the finer sensibilities of the audience.)
It did not escape my perception that even back in the 1890s, ‘the best’ institutions of higher education were lauded because collegiates could make ‘the right connections, for a lifetime’… what we call networking. True, meritocracy was the mooted ideal of schools like Harvard and Yale — but a meritocracy restricted to rich white boys, plus a few exceptionally talented farm boys or middle-class city kids, who ‘could be trusted around the sisters’ of those rich white boys. (No hypogamous marriages for the female kin of the Princeton Man!)
Nor did the parallel terrors about ‘the Papist’ and ‘the Hebrew’ in the 1890s, and the ‘the Negro’ in the 1960s, go unremarked… and not just by me…
A lot of the push to stop subsidizing education is really about limiting who has access to opportunity. And yes, BIPOC people are the primary target of those measures, but so are low income white people. Just saying
— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) October 26, 2021
So much of the anti intellectualism and susceptibility to misinformation is about limiting competition because in terms of ingenuity…well, just look at how many ways tech keeps reinventing public buses…
— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) October 26, 2021
And a lot of "failing" inner city schools are outright sabotaged once their numbers start to get to high (I went to two such schools so stow it) because that's when budget cuts start to come in. You can do more with less, but nothing with nothing & districts know that
— Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) October 26, 2021
Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Walling Off the (Education) GardenPost + Comments (94)