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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (4826)	2/4/2001 7:19:46 PM
From: bela_ghoulashi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Well, bland will refrain from making the obvious comment that you can't help kids prenatally if prenatal means they aren't kids yet. Obviously that would be a foolish statement. Middle school...isn't that just about the age of puberty? Okay, okay, enough smart comments. Seriously, you can give them all the education individually they will respect you like, but if collectively their peers view it as a sellout to another culture, you're going to have difficult time getting traction. People of the Jewish persuasion, to take a contrasting example, place a high value culturally on education. It is held up as something absolutely to be respected and striven for. They appear to have an attitude about it that appears to make a difference. They didn't formulate or achieve that attitude by saying: "Give us more money, and then we'll change. Give us more advantages. Give us more this, give us more that." They pretty much did it themselves, in the face of no less adversity that what is faced in our inner cities today.

To: epicure who wrote (4826)	2/4/2001 8:02:36 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

I notice something in almost every conversation about inner-city education: many people seem to think that because the task is very difficult, maybe even impossible, that it should not be attempted. This seems odd for a culture that prides itself on a "can-do" attitude. It also seems unarguably true that our inner-city problems are the legacy of our own history of racism and discrimination, and it seems strange to me that so many people who speak of absolute moral standards where other issues are concerned do not seem feel that their absolute moral standards require us to clean up our own mess. Personally, of course, I think that a serious attempt to provide education for inner-city youth is a question of enlightened self-interest, not charity or morality. But it amuses me to see how selective moral codes can be. The mere cessation of official discrimination is hardly an adequate response. If children spend most of an afternoon flinging objects around their rooms, would the mere cessation of flinging constitute a cleanup? Hardly. Is it too much to ask of an adult society that we clean up the mess we made, instead of pretending that because we have stopped making the mess - sort of - we have cleaned it up? Apparently it is.