Privilege

Sully posted a link to this video of Tim Doner, a 17-year-old polyglot who can speak (to varying degrees) nearly 20 languages.

It is barely mentioned in the video, but Tim attends The Dalton School. And to me that was the singularly most important detail about this boy, and we can draw so many conclusions from it.

While its easy to celebrate Mr. Doner's accomplishments and truly I would be a jackass to not acknowledge that the kid is obviously brilliant, what would be equally egregious is if I didn't ask just how many languages he would have learned if he had grown up in Kansas City Public Schools? Or in East St. Louis? Or anywhere other than a posh prep school in the Upper East Side of Manhattan that regularly matriculates a vast number of students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton?

Ask yourself, as you watch that video, two questions. The first is the one I've spoken above...how would Tim Doner have done without all that privilege?

The second, vastly more important question, is what our society would look like if every teenager had access to the education quality found among ultra-rich Manhattan prep school attendees. What if every school was a Dalton School? What if every American student could be taught Mandarin by a native-speaking Chinese teacher in a class with a student/teacher ratio of 3/1?

I think there's a deep cynicism in America right now, evidenced by Federal and State budget cuts to education. It implies that humans are no longer something the Government thinks of as a good investment. I realize crony capitalism and lobbying and what have you tend to drag government dollars away from things like education, but nevertheless many Congresspersons are parents and therefore have to realize by cutting state education budgets they are crippling the ability of future generations to create a productive and vibrant society and economy.
Or...they are secure in their own privilege and subsequently their children's privilege allows them to attend a local Dalton School analogue, making the state education cuts meaningless to them personally. Nevertheless this indicates cynicism, because it means those Congresspersons believe that state education will not produce anything but bad apples and chaff, so why bother spending state money on it, and the students within it.
Or...they are simply so cynical about the future of American society that they'll throw it away in favor of a hedonistic, cronyism-filled present.

Because unless you are cynical about the future, you'd be throwing everything you can at the kids. They're our salvation. You'd be shoving free biology textbooks into their hands, begging them to find cures. You'd give them unfettered access to high-performance computing facilities and climate data and beg them to solve anthropogenic climate change. You'd install gigabit internet in every school, give every student a laptop, maybe an iPad. You'd demolish old schools and build new ones with big north-facing windows and ask the kids to sit there for an hour a day and dream up a brighter future. You'd pay the best teachers a small fortune to go into the slums and teach kids there. And in places where kids left school everyday and had to go to an unsafe home, you'd open cutting-edge boarding schools where they could learn in an environment of trust and security. And you'd not give two shiny shits what any of this cost because you'd realize the cynicism should be turned back on your generation, and not projected forward onto the children. You broke the world. But the kids can fix it. That is, if you just stopped knee-capping them the day they're born.

Honesty is necessary, too. We can't have a world where 100% of children turn into Tim Doner at age 17. The reality is that a bell curve exists. Someone else might learn as hard as he can and achieve the best he can achieve: Air Conditioner Repairman. But at least he will have come to that profession honestly, as opposed to now, where a privilege pyramid exists and honest, good service professions are looked down upon from above by those who were born into a caste that would never have had to do that work anyway.

There are few things that annoy me more than state budget cuts to education. When you cut education funding, only the rich get educated.


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