Virginia moving to eliminate all accelerated math courses before 11th grade as part of equity-focused plan https://t.co/T1DoD4zLB5
— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 22, 2021
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Harrison Bergeron wasn’t supposed to be read as a fucking how-to manual.
And they wonder why other countries and private schools are eating our lunch. This is vile. The similarities to that story are like crossing off a checklist at this point. .
Private schools, at least in left wing s***holes like NYC, are working hard to erase any advantage they might have had.
Other countries, that’s a different matter entirely. I grew up in Holland and came here for college, having completed secondary education there. The difference between secondary education there and here earned me 2 years of college credit (so I got a B.S. in Physics in 2 years). One key difference is that in Holland, and I believe in many other European countries, secondary education is not “one size (mis)fits all” but rather it comes in a number of flavors, depending on the abilities and goals of the students. A teenager aiming to be a plumber and one aiming to be a doctor do not go to the same type of high school there.
That used to be the case here in the US. In 1970, half of the US adult population had a high school diploma, and only ten percent had college degrees.
Then at some point, Americans decided that it was beneath their social class to have a blue collar job. Parents are all screaming that their kid needs to go to college or he is a failure. So kids did, and more than half of them never finished.
Well, that just won’t do, so more degrees were offered, and now it is so easy to get a 4 year degree that they are nearly worthless. Now 90 percent of US adults have a high school diploma, 50 percent of adults have a college degree, and yet a plurality of adults don’t know the difference between “you’re” and “your” and think that Vonnegut is a gastrointestinal malady.
The US claims to have a 99.4% literacy rate, but that must be for a liberal definition of literacy. My experience from the 7 years I spent as a teacher is that a quarter of graduating high school seniors are reading at no more than a 5th grade level.
for those not familiar with the story “Harrison Bergeron”
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxtc3JlZG1hbmVuZ2xpc2h8Z3g6MjdlZjYzZmNmMjFjMjgxZA
I read that story when I was in High School, and I didn’t truly understand how prescient it was at the time. I daresay that Vonnegut is not a part of high school curriculum any longer.
“Equality” is not about raising anyone up. That takes too much effort, and exposes the reality that not everyone is equal in all ways.
No, “equality” is all about lowering standards. Not enough people can get into advanced math courses, so get rid of advanced math courses. See, problem solved.
Leftists are nothing but lazy toddlers. They just want, without any desire whatsoever to earn what they want.
Kornbluth already wrote about that 70 years ago in a story entitled The Marching Morons.
“Screwtape Proposes A Toast” also works.
Free people are never equal, and equal people are never free.
Find a society if equal people and you’ll be looking at a society of slaves, all equally miserable.
A similar warning is made in the song “The Trees” written by Neil Pearl, of the band Rush. The parable is that the maples were angry at the oaks, because they were too tall. So, “they passed a noble law, and the trees are all kept equal, by hatchet, axe, and saw.”