| What should be the penalty for an education system that murders a student’s soul? |
There is a story told about young Thomas Edison. One day he brought a note home from his teacher, to give to his mom. She opened the envelope and when she read the note her eyes filled with tears.
“What does it say?” asked young Thomas.
“It says: ‘Your son is a genius, and there is no one in this school capable of teaching him. Please take him out of school and teach him yourself.’”
And that is exactly what the mother did. We all know that Thomas Edison went on to become one of the most famous inventors of all time. He was the one who gave the world the electric lightbulb, the recording of sound (phonograph), and the movie camera, among many other inventions.
Years later, long after his mother died, Edison was going through her belongings and came upon that old note from the teacher. His mother had saved it. He opened the envelope and this time read the note himself.
It said: “Your son is mentally ill, and there is no one in this school capable of teaching him. Please take him out of school and teach him yourself.”
I’m not worthy to even grovel in Edison’s shadow, but in a strange way, I had something similar happen in school. It was third grade, and my academic performance was plummeting downwards. I was failing almost every test and apparently there was talk at school administration level of holding me back a year.
But I was blessed with a teacher who stood up for me. I learned later that this conversation had occurred between “Mrs. Wilson” and the administrators.
“Look,” she’d said. “I’m been teaching here for years, and I can recognize smart kids, and also kids that just aren’t very smart. This kid is one of the most intelligent I’ve ever had. I don’t know why he’s doing poorly, but it’s not because he isn’t smart. Holding him back a year I think will make it worse.”
The school administrators decided to give me an IQ test. The results that came back were…well, let’s just say they more than vindicated Mrs. Wilson’s opinion. The school principal discussed everything with my parents, and my parents discussed it all with me—all of it, including the IQ results. Quite a lot to dump on a third grader. But my parents explained it this way.
“You were given a test to see how intelligent you were, how smart you were.” They showed me the results of the test, and where it had placed me on the Stanford-Binet IQ scoring system. I remember being quite shocked, because I’d always thought I was one of the dumb kids. Certainly the grades on my school work suggested that.
“What’s important for you to understand,” my parents explained, “is that this means you can do anything you want in life. You can enter into any field or have any career. You have the mental ability to succeed in anything you do.”
Ironically, that new insight didn’t immediately affect my grades, but it did affect my dreams. I suddenly had a very different self-perception, and took to heart the concept that I could do anything I wished. IQ, at least, would never hold me back. Talk about a confidence booster!
I somehow made it all the way through college, became a boatbuilder in Michigan, then became a paid political staffer on a U.S. Senate campaign—also serving as Executive Pilot to the candidate. But we lost that election. I was adrift, career-wise, and moved back in with my parents. Six months later, I decided to revolutionize the diamond market by introducing online, computerized trading to that centuries-old industry. No one was less likely to succeed at such a task. I knew nothing about diamonds, nothing about computers, nothing about business or how to start one, and if all that weren’t enough—I had no money. Oh, and I wasn’t even Jewish, as most everyone in the diamond business was at the time.
But none of that fazed me because I remembered that talk I’d received from my parents back in third grade. I knew I was smart enough to achieve anything I wanted. So wouldn’t that include revolutionizing the diamond industry via computer technology? Of course it would! As they say, the rest is history.
What’s important here is the c-factor: confidence. A child who has it can accomplish anything. Without it, failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who—early in life—learns or at least is taught to believe, that they can accomplish anything, becomes able to. There are countless examples of young people with big dreams who achieved them. And I expect in every case the most important thing they had in common was confidence. It’s probably the single most powerful gift you can give to a child—and the greatest theft if you tear it away.
Now flip these stories around. What would have happened to young Edison if his mom had read to him what the teacher had actually written? What would have happened to me, if my third grade teacher had recommended holding me back a year?
Or imagine a soldier returned from the war, with both legs shot off. What message should their physical therapist—trying to teach them how to walk on mechanical limbs—instill in them?
Message A: “Sorry, dude. Sucks to be you. If you work really hard you’ll someday perhaps be able to kind of hobble around on these ridiculous steel contraptions. But people are always going to look at you kind of weird, and most anything you might have wanted to do in life, best forget those dreams.”
Message B: “You’re one of the luckiest people on Earth. That IED could have killed you. But it didn’t. Yeah, you’ve got some work to do to master these artificial limbs, but aren’t you glad you live in a time where such things exist? Learn how to walk again, and pretty much anything you want to do with the rest of your life, you’ll be able to do. Artificial limbs don’t need to slow you down—not in terms of pursuing your dreams at least. Hey, do you know a guy named Mark Inglis climbed Mt. Everest with artificial legs just like these? Yep, he was the first, but quite a few other double-amputees have done it since. If those guys can climb Mt. Everest with artificial legs, what, exactly, do you think YOU won’t be able to do? And here’s a bonus: Everywhere you go, people are going to look at you be and be impressed, and know you have the kind of character to overcome most any challenge in life. Dude, like I said, you’re one of the luckiest people on Earth.”
See the difference? Both Message A and Message B might be technically accurate. A physical therapist wouldn’t necessarily be lying to communicate either. But which is likely to produce a better outcome?
That brings us to critical race theory. All it teaches white folks is to grovel under the mother-of-all-guilt-trips, which will turn them into sniveling apologists for life. Whitey can handle it.
But CRT’s effect on African Americans? Well, it’s not difficult to imagine. What would happen if you somehow were to convince a child that the deck was stacked against them, and if they ever did manage to succeed, it would be against near-hopeless odds? What if you taught them that they lived in a society in which the color of their skin would forever doom them to second-class status and that anything they tried to do in life would be far more difficult, because of their race? What if you told them they lived in a world that was systemically racist and their life would have to be spent fighting against that unfair system, imposed on them by white-skinned supremacists?
Yet that is precisely what Critical Race Theory teaches. If you were looking for a silver bullet that would—almost on its own—set back African Americans and doom them to a lifetime of failure, CRT would be precisely the tool for the job.
Blacks in America survived centuries of slavery. They survived the horrors of reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan, and Jim Crow laws. They overcame hundreds of years of racism and somehow prospered. But will they survive the poison to their souls that is CRT? Will they survive being taught to worship the false god of equity, which means turning their back on the noble faith of equality?
Remember, they’re opposites. Equality means you’re free to live your dreams. Equity means your dreams can be achieved only by stealing someone else’s—and that you have the right to do so.
It’s not for me—a white guy—to speak about how CRT and its predecessors have blunted and even reversed the economic and academic progress Blacks were making up until these poisonous ideologies were implemented in the late sixties/early seventies. But economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell—a black guy—has written about it extensively and my own comments are sourced from his writings.
It comes down to this. Murder is illegal, and everyone agrees it should be. What should be the penalty for an education system that murders a person’s soul? Shouldn’t that be illegal too?
The teaching of Critical Race Theory should be banned from every institution in America—because no community should have its dreams destroyed by being taught it most likely can never achieve them.
Jacques Voorhees 