A Modest Question 3: More Of The Shifting Dream

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The reason for exploring all this American Dream stuff is the poor performance of Black students on achievement tests.  Are the tests measuring the right things?

The modern White American Dream seems to be clean, indoor, meaningful work that pays well enough for an apartment with high-speed WiFi and a Light Rail Pass, such as sitting in a cubicle at a non-profit, saving the whales.  For that, students need basic arithmetic, reading, writing and not much more, certainly not college level expertise.  Any American who shares that dream – Asian, Hispanic, Black, Native American, Muslim, Jewish, or refugee – needs the same skills.  Any high school should be capable of teaching what they need to know and our traditional achievement math and reading tests should be capable of measuring it.

What about people who don’t share that Dream, who reject it?  Those people don’t do well in those White Dream schools because the skills being taught aren’t relevant to their futures.  Those students become a stereotype (which doesn’t fit every rebel but fits enough to have a grain of truth or the stereotype wouldn’t be useful) of Black Male Troublemakers, disrupting the school, fighting with others, preventing everyone else from learning.

So what is those rebels’ dream?  What skills would they prefer to learn, to succeed at their Dream?

If the Young Black Man Dream was as silly as the hateful racists claim – free sex, free stuff, free time – then the required skills would not be the same level of math and reading skills required for the White American Dream. Instead, young Black men would need verbal skills to convince fat White chicks to bed them and to hand over their welfare checks.  They would need to speak English poorly enough to get along with their peers but well enough to convince probation officers that they were doing nothing wrong when the police arrested them.  They would need pattern recognition skills to decipher gang colors and tattoos to avoid trouble.  They would need enough arithmetic to make change from selling drugs and buying bullets.  Yes, I’m intentionally being absurd to illustrate the point:  all students want to learn things they think will be helpful in their future lives as they imagine them.  The question is: how do Black male students imagine their future lives?

So back to education: if you are a young Black man and the school isn’t teaching skills relevant to your Dream – whatever Dream that is – then naturally you’re be bored stiff in class after about 8th grade.  You’ve learned all the useful knowledge the school has to offer – the rest isn’t relevant to your Dream.  Bored, restless, disciplined, disrespectful, fighting . . . and doing poorly on tests: do we have a discipline problem, or a Dream problem?

Should we accommodate the Dream?  Or try to change it?

Joe Doakes

It’s way past time to change the terms by which we define “the dream”.

7 thoughts on “A Modest Question 3: More Of The Shifting Dream

  1. If the Young Black Man Dream was as silly as the hateful racists claim – free sex, free stuff, free time –[….]

    I’d argue that that’s actually Every Young Man’s dream.

    Hell, it’s my dream now! And I fail on both the young and black qualifiers of that statement.

  2. Nerdbert hits on magic; who among us doesn’t want easy sex and leisure? And let’s be blunt as well; inner city schools appear to have been doing a bang-up job (no pun intended) of helping kids to achieve this dream. The welfare rolls and abortion clinics bear costly and bloody witness to this, as do our prisons.

    What we need, I think, is rather an education that informs young people of the costs of treating life as if it’s merely an opportunity for cheap flings and video games and the like. I’ve personally had a few chances to rebuke my own children for some things they’ve said by pointing out how their grandparents and great grandparents grew up–“you think 65 is cool in our house, let’s try 40 in the morning when you wake up or less”, and that sort of thing. Having a civilization requires some compromises on our part with our dreams.

  3. BB, it’s not the schools that have been doing a bang-up job, it’s the Democratic service state that’s been doing the job. If the state actually enforced welfare limits and cut down on fraud and made being a deadbeat loser less comfortable then there would be massive change in attitude in the inner city. Right now everybody games the system and nobody thinks they’ll be caught simply because even suggested welfare reform or enforcing the limits is greeted by calls of “RACISSSS!!!!!”

    The really sorry part? That attitude is escaping the ghetto and moving its way up the socio-economic ladder. I’ve seen families driving Lexuses whose kids are on free lunch at suburban schools simply because the school employees are forbidden to even inquire as to eligibility. And I know that because one of my relatives was actually given a talking-to by the superintendent of her district when she had the temerity to do so.

  4. That’s the problem, kids today do not want to grow up, they expect to remain kids forever. Unlike hippies, however, they expect everything to be handed to them. No communes for the millennials.

  5. Nerdbert, the list of contributing institutions to the denial of reality that plagues us is long, don’t you think? Point well taken that it ain’t just the schools; I would simply respond that they could help immensely if they started teaching Booker T. Washington and people like him a little bit more.

    And yes, we need to rein in welfare, and a whole bunch of other things. I am sad to say that I think we are dreaming to actually achieve this, and sadder to note that thousands of young black men are going to pay for our failure with their lives each year.

  6. Start every one of those “rein in *” arguments with the question “People respond to incentives: yes or no?”.

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