Second Class Citizens

As several of us sat at a back table, the El Sombrero door was suddenly filled by a tough-looking character whose black skin matched perfectly his leather jacket and also the dark imaginings of events that might follow too close an encounter with his disposition. The first rule of survival in such situations being no eye contact, I immediately became unusually attentive to the discussion underway at our table.

To my astonishment, however, the new arrival sauntered over to our table and sat down. He knew the graduate students. It turned out that he was also one of my fellow faculty members - assigned to the "third college,'' a new division of the university for minority students that still had no name because of an ongoing squabble over which third-world revolutionary to name it after (Lumumba - Zapata being the most recent discard).

What followed was a discourse on "third-world'' and black-power politics in which I took no part - being unprepared academically, politically, or even psychologically for the prejudices of my esteemed colleague. (Actually, I just wanted to stay out of a fight.) Eventually, however, the subject turned to teaching. I was at the time teaching freshman chemistry to a class of 300 students and found myself pointing out that I made no effort whatever to tailor the goals of my course to separate standards for minority students or any other group regardless of their preparation or ability. In my opinion, they all needed to to know the same material in order to be prepared for the same post-academic world or - at the very least - to know that they did not know the material, so that they could plan accordingly.

The black professor's response was immediate. "You are right!'' he said. "Your course is tough. I know, I'm tutoring two students in your class. But you are exactly right. Our worst enemies are these white liberals who teach watered-down courses to our people and turn them into permanent second-class citizens.'' More than 25 years have passed since that conversation, and times have changed. American schools and universities (with some, increasingly rare exceptions) have become less selective. Now, they are turning all of the students into second-class citizens.

More important has been the modern liberal campaign to turn all American schools into tools for social and political engineering. This transformation has been so complete that the majority of school time is now devoted to politically correct indoctrination rather than basic academic learning. Even courses labeled "mathematics'' have been ruined by infusions of non-academic nonsense. (See Access to Energy 24, 5, p 4, January 1997, "MTV Math Doesn't Add Up.'') Moreover, pegged as their programs are to "grade'' levels, tax-financed schools are setting the academic standard for most alternatives such as private schools and home schools. Parents think of their children as being in particular "grades,'' and the market responds with materials at those grade levels as defined by public schools. In our home school curriculum, we have omitted grade levels entirely because today they norm students to a very low academic standard.