Why is so terribly wrong for society to destroy young girl’s hearts and minds with images of beauty in the media but not at all a problem when schoolteachers – teachers speaking directly to and specifically about individual students – tell the poor kids that they cannot learn?

Answer:

Because beauty is considered cool & learning isn’t. Tell ‘em they can’t learn, & they’ll sigh with relief because they’re officially not geeks. Tell ‘em they’re ugly, & the little tin god Self-Esteem will shriek in outrage. Must keep one’s priorities straight, after all.

I am not sure that I would want to bring my books to school if my TEACHER was going to make snide remarks about why did I bother instead of trying to help me from, oh, starting in the fifth grade and continuing on through when I was shunted to special ed or worse. I don’t think they forget to bring books to school, I think they’re afraid to be seen trying when they have been told over and over again that they will fail. Seems like this argument –not wanting to try for fear of not doing well or failing – is acceptable when we talk about nerdy kids being subjected to PE. Why doesn’t it apply here?

Having gone to mixed schools where black and brown students, poor students, and students with absentee parents were treated like, at best, interlopers and gate crashers, I empathize with many of the coping strategies these guys come up with.

Why is so terribly wrong for society to destroy young girl’s hearts and minds with images of beauty in the media but not at all a problem when schoolteachers – teachers speaking directly to and specifically about individual students – tell the poor kids that they cannot learn?

I’m not saying that I buy the whole beauty myth thing. I’m just baffled because the average TV talking head or magazine pieces or cocktail party chatter accepts one pretty much entirely and rejects the other totally.

My point was and is that these guys can get the job done. The challenge is how to convince more of them of this.

Whoa….this gives a whole new meaning to the expression “White Man’s Burden”!

Be that as it may, what’s this got to do with education and its value, other than somebody perhaps engaging in A=A thinking, viz.: valuing education = acting “white” = over-intellectualization = sexlessness?

Sex is dying in the white community, and I do mean the liberal white community.

Oh, so it’s not all bad then….
Ross wrote: Many blacks believe the reasons whites bury their dead quickly is because white people turn black after death if not buried quickly.

Eventually.

The armed forces have a comparitively good record with minorities, but don’t overstate it. They do their best to avoid felons, high school drop outs and GEDs. These categories have a much higher failure rate. The Army takes them when it needs bodies to put make their enlistment quotas. The Army loses one third of their troops before they complete their initial enlistment. They keep the ones who accept its values and remove those who do not. The Army decides who they get rid of, not the troops. Students decide when they have enough of school.

Perhaps a more relevant term for this discussion, rather than “sexless” or “publically repressed”, would be self-control. People with self-control, or self-discipline, tend to be more successful in all walks of life, because they don’t immediately gratify every little desire which flits through their mind. They have a more highly developed ability to focus on goals, and attain their goals because they do not easily allow themselves to become distracted.

Actually, the decription I have more often heard is soulless. There are cultural differences between blacks and whites that some people on both sides interpret negatively.

Whites see that blacks tend be much more boisterous and that is taken as a sign of low intellegence or of being primitive. Blacks on the other hand tend to think that whites are lacking spirit (soul) because of how restrained we tend to act. The way this difference manifest itself during religious services is interesting to observe.

Whites traditionally bury their dead shortly after death. Blacks wait for a while. Many blacks believe the reasons whites bury their dead quickly is because white people turn black after death if not buried quickly. (Yes, I was surprised when a black friend asked me if that rumor was true.) As an aside, reasons for blacks waiting to bury their dead include the wider dispersal or black families made it where it took longer for everyone to arrive and many of the funeral homes required blacks to pay in advance and the money had to be raised before the funeral.

Dang, I lost track of time and I am late leaving to pick my wife up from work!

Happy New Year,