Wonderful Teachers Should Never Let Themselves Be

Competitive Skills Are Desperately Needed By Poor Children In America, And Realistic Recognition Of The Economic Roles That They May Someday Have An Opportunity To Fill Is Obviously Important, Too. But There Is More To Life, And There Ought To Be Much More To Childhood, Than Readiness For Economic Functions.

Children Are Not Simply Commodities To Be Herded Into Line And Trained For The Jobs That White People Who Live In Segregated Neighborhoods Have Available.

But What Is Now Encompassed By The One Word (“school”) Are Two Very Different Kinds Of Institutions That, In Function, Finance And Intention, Serve Entirely Different Roles. Both Are Needed For Our Nation’s Governance. But Children In One Set Of Schools Are Educated To Be Governors; Children In The Other Set Of Schools Are Trained For Being Governed. The Former Are Given The Imaginative Range To Mobilize Ideas For Economic Growth; The Latter Are Provided With The Discipline To Do The Narrow Tasks The First Group Will Prescribe.

The Rich...should Beg The Poor To Forgive Us For The Bread We Bring Them. Healthy People Sometimes Feel They Need To Beg Forgiveness Too, Although There Is No Reason Why. Maybe We Simply Ask Forgiveness For Not Being Born Where These Poor Women Have Been Born, Knowing That If We Lived Here Too, Our Fate Might Well Have Been The Same.

I Beg People Not To Accept The Seasonal Ritual Of Well-timed Charity On Christmas Eve. It's Blasphemy.