The kids are alright

The three readers of this blog may begin to develop the inaccurate impression that I support the emergent plot line of the right: we have overreached in our effort to provide college education to the mass of Americans who are unable to make the grade. I'd no sooner blame the kids who fail my classes for that failure than the boys in Gaza who take up arms. In fact, they are creatures of their environment, groomed to be just what society has wanted them to be for the last generation, a permanent class of pliable consumers and ready workers for the dull, poorly paid jobs a debtor economy provides.

Take the case of a SSC athlete who graduated from a good state public school thanks to METCO (thanks to a loyal reader for research on this). Now METCO is intended to bus black kids from poor schools to good schools in white towns in Massachusetts. According to the state, "It is a voluntary program intended to expand educational opportunities, increase diversity, and reduce racial isolation, by permitting students in certain cities to attend public schools in other communities that have agreed to participate."

But somehow this student graduated from one of these good school without having been able to take advantage of the educational opportunities allegedly afforded to him or her by the METCO program. Clearly the student's parents made an effort by opting into the METCO program, but somehow the system didn't work. Perhaps the kid is a bad seed, unable or unwilling to learn. More likely METCO doesn't live up to its promise. I offer this bid of evidence: on a snowy morning Marblehead Public Schools announced that school would be in session but that no METCO kids would attend. No bus, no black kids. If the school district took seriously its commitment to integration, the proper decision, inconvenient as it would have been for all of us parents and school workers, would have been to cancel school. That they did not suggests continuing inequality perpetuated in what is allegedly one of the most liberal states in the nation.

Beyond this is the litnay of commentary epitomized by mark Bauerlein's book, The Dumbest Generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and Jeopardizes our future. These are what I'd call the "kids today" jeremiads, as in "Kid's today don't know what it was like to walk in the snow five miles to school in bare feet, each kid carrying her bible and slide rule." True enough, they don't, but then we don't know what it is like anymore to live without tomatoes in January. I'm certainly skepitcal of "progress" but don't blame the teachers and the students for the world you have wrought.