The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.
Hypersegregated inner-city schools – in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 – are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.
We continue, however, to write about important people, prize-winning people, blacks of grandeur, women of great fire, fame or wit. We do not write about ordinary people.
Unlike these powerful grown-ups, children have no ideologies to reinforce, no superstructure of political opinion to promote, no civic equanimity or image to defend, no personal reputation to secure.
Good teachers don’t approach a child of this age with overzealousness or with destructive conscientiousness. They’re not drill-masters in the military or floor managers in a production system. They are specialists in opening small packages. They give the string a tug but do it carefully. They don’t yet know what’s in the box. They don’t know if it’s breakable.
Equity, after all, does not mean simply equal funding. Equal funding for unequal needs is not equality.
We should invest in kids like these,” we’re told, “because it will be more expensive not to.” Why do our natural compassion and religious inclinations need to find a surrogate in dollar savings to be voiced or acted on? Why not give these kids the best we have because we are a wealthy nation and they are children and deserve to have some fun while they are still less than four feet high?
Unless we have the wealth to pay for private education, we are compelled by law to go to public school – and to the public school in our district. Thus the state, by requiring attendance but refusing to require equity, effectively requires inequality. Compulsory inequity, perpetuated by state law, too frequently condemns our children to unequal lives.
Still, I think it grieves the heart of God when human beings created in His image treat other human beings like filthy rags.
Childhood does not exist to serve the national economy. In a healthy nation, it should be the other way around.
Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as “sinkhole” when opposing funding for Chicago’s children. “We can’t keep throwing money,” said Governor Thompson in 1988, “into a black hole.” The Chicago Tribune notes that, when this phrase is used, people hasten to explain that it is not intended as a slur against the race of many of Chicago’s children. “But race,” says the Tribune, “never is far from the surface...
I urge you to be teachers so that you can join with children as the co-collaborators in a plot to build a little place of ecstasy and poetry and gentle joy.
Turning in his seat, he gestures at the street and shrugs. “If you don’t, as an American, begin to give these kids the kind of education that you give the kids of Donald Trump, you’re asking for disaster.
Children long for this – a voice, a way of being heard – but many sense that there is no one in the world to hear their words, so they are drawn to ways of malice. If they cannot sing, they scream. They are vessels of the spirit but the spirit sometimes is entombed; it can’t get out, and so they smash it!
I believe that the wilderness is where God is found.
If Americans had to discriminate directly against other people’s children, I believe most citizens would find this morally abhorrent. Denial, in an active sense, of other people’s children is, however, rarely necessary in this nation. Inequality is mediated for us by a taxing system that most people do not fully understand and seldom scrutinize.
When I had asked Mrs. Flowers how she held up in the face of all the death and violence within her neighborhood, she had given me a simple answer: “This family talks to God.
The idea that private money can solve our problems is very dangerous. Ultimately that’s charity. Charity is a lovely thing. I’ll never turn it down. But charity is not a substitute for systematic justice and equality.
One would not have thought that children in America would ever have to choose between a teacher or a playground or sufficient toilet paper. Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the child of the highest bidder – the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.
People who know but do not act do evil too. I don’t know if I would call them evil but they’re certainly not thinking about heaven.
But many human beings do take pleasure in inflicting pain on others, and those who have the least to be proud of or to be happy about are often the ones who take that pleasure most.