I met my friend Avery LIBRELLE yesterday out on the bike trail. Avery, naturally, rides a recumbant bike. Go figure.
LIBRELLE: Hah! Tom Stinson, the state economist, says that Minnesota is doing pretty well! And that our education system is one of the reasons!
MITCH: Well, good!
LIBRELLE: Hah! Better than good! It means the DFL plan for leading the state is the right one!
MITCH: What? Give “eduation” everything it wants?
LIBRELLE: Yes! Raise your hand for the children!
MITCH: Oboy. OK. For starters, yes – a workforce that can do the job, whatever the job is, is a good thing. But as we saw last week, to a great extent education – at least, big institutional education – follows prosperity. Not the other way around.
And Minnesota prospered, especially during the “Minnesota Miracle”, as much due to its human, social and economic geography as anything else. It was the economic, social, population and communications center of a large, productive region – especially at a time when the United States as a whole had no competition. So while it certainly helped that Minnesota had a strong education system, it helped even more that we were in the right place at the right time.
LIBRELLE: All the more reason to spend more on education!
MITCH: Is it? Is our education system in Minnesota worth what we spend on it now?
Especially given the number of black, Latino and Asian Minnesotans who are being served so very very badly by our current system? Pouring money into a status quo that is decaying fast and is doing little more than resting on the laurels of an earlier era – and let’s not even address whether those laurels were especially deserved – is a huge mistake.
LIBRELLE: You are clearly a racist.
MITCH: For wanting to fix a system that discriminates against minority Minnesotans?
LIBRELLE: Yep! Sometimes you have to show them what’s right!
MITCH: Huh.
(And SCENE)
Well, I used to say that it is such a waste of taxpayers money to subsidize “gender studies”, “gay-lesbian-misc studies”, etc.
But looking at how liberal Twin Cities Big Corporations have become, perhaps there is big buck jobs for these people.
People in Red States with lots of children buy General Mills cereals, 3M tape, Best Buy TVs, Target clothing, come to Twins games at Target Field, then those corporations take the money and hire leftist political types in their Twin Cities offices.
In colonial days, devoting extra effort to teaching Persons of Color how to Act White was considered a good thing. Cross-cultural uplift was the White Man’s Burden and fell under the “teach a man to fish” concept.
Nowadays it’s a hate crime!
@Joe Doakes:
I would spin that another way. Many of the successful charter schools in poor neighborhoods are successful because they attempt to overcome habits established in homes and earlier schools, habits of language, dress, respect, and discipline. They attempt to be an island of the best of middle class morality and ambition in the midst of a poor neighborhood that lacks both.