Sarah Carr worries that the college-for-all movement, while egalitarian in theory, is “often quite paternalistic” in practice:
In their efforts to set poor children of color on the path to college, the idealistic young educators attempt to inculcate middle-class aspirations in their students through a form of body and mind control: instructing them in everything from how to take notes to how to sit, talk, walk, and move; embracing the goals of “re-acculturating” and “re-calibrating” them; and calling them “scholars,” in honor of the new pursuit. One veteran principal refers to it as “lockstepping.” In a not atypical scene inside a New Orleans charter school, a kindergarten teacher told her young charges, “We have a lot to do this year—a lot if we want to go to the first grade. The first graders already have read this book and moved on to other books. I know all of you want to go to first grade because all of you want to go to college. But you need to show discipline over your bodies to do that.”
Many parents (and even some “scholars”) welcome this structure and the intense focus on college. But some would like to see the new charters incorporate more trade and technical training in addition to their heavy college-prep emphasis. And others see a disconnect between the reformers’ goals and their methods. New Orleans grandfather Ronald McCoy shook his head during a 2010 interview with NPR when he thought about some college-prep charter schools that force their students to walk a straight line—marked out with tape—in the hallway between classes. “This walking the line?” he said. “I have been incarcerated, and that’s where I learned about walking behind those lines and staying on the right-hand side of the wall.” Applying the college-for-all ethos in a top-down fashion in low-income communities of color creates the risk of being more imperialistic than egalitarian.
John McWhorter wants to free “black America from the myth that the only way to have a decent existence and raise a family is to get a B.A.”:
The op-ed pages tell us this week after week. But did your cable technician, ultrasound technician, mechanic, building inspector or bail bondsman go to college? And do you get the feeling those jobs are in any danger of disappearing anytime soon? Community colleges and vocational schools are Black Power too.
The Dish 