A 13-Year-Old's Slavery Analogy Raises Some Uncomfortable Truths in School | Hacker News Reader

A 13-Year-Old's Slavery Analogy Raises Some Uncomfortable Truths in School

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35 pointsColinWright10 comments

This little 13-year-old girl isn't a truth teller but a racist who apparently resents being taught by white people.

"""" While the issues Williams raises are controversial, even Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has acknowledged that closing the achievement gap requires more black educators in the classroom. """"

There is absolutely no proof of this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/11/black-teachers-may-...

Yes, the way the teachers/school reacted was horrible. And yes, there is a LOT broken in our current education system, including teachers that don't really care to teach, but comparing our schools to slavery is a bit much.

Are you sure? Just because the condition of her fellow students isn't blatant slavery doesn't mean it isn't effectively a form of it.

She did not call the teachers "slave owners". She is saying people of color who are effectively locked in their situation, with no way out, and therefor stuck on the bottom rungs of society and forced to do the lowest jobs for the lowest pay are effectively in bondage. There is a reason indentured servitude is illegal even if you got yourself into the predicament "fair and square"; it equates to slavery.

Geolibertarianism and Georgism (look at this list before you dismiss: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism#Notable_people_influen...) make a similar argument about the effective consequence of private land ownership, that in the end people without land are effectively slaves to those who own all the land, because you have to stand and live somewhere, and grow food somewhere, and the only way to pay rent for the land is to take whatever work the landlords give you (They are not called landlords for nothing). It is a less blatant form of feudalism, which most people today would equate to slavery.

The teachers and administrators in this sad but true story did exactly what one might predict if the young author's claims are true. And they clearly are.

Public education is 100% not even across the nation. This is for sure. However, when children are taught to read, they can very easily understand that they are not participating in an education, rather they are merely receiving "pamphlets" on what to fill their heads with so they can be perceived as educated. In the bigger picture, education itself obviously needs an overhaul. The school's reaction to her brilliant interpretation of an extraordinary individual is unwarranted and goes against the principles of what an educational institution is designed for. Honestly, I don't believe the issue here is race, as the author of the article makes it out to be. The issue is incompetence in public education across the board.

It is an issue of race when race has some influence on public policy and where money is spent, who gets incarcerated, who gets the jobs that pays well enough for parents to have more time with their children, etc.

Flagged: off-topic.

From the Guidelines[0]:

    What to Submit

    On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
    That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
    reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
    gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

What can be of more intellectually interesting than education itself? Hn has shown itself over and over again to be horrified at the existing education system, and interested in how to change it, by evolution, or by revolution. Indeed, many startups are actively trying to disrupt education.

This article is in some senses a call to action.

Just my $0.02.

[0] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'd agree with you if this article were more about hacking education, or one of the many education startups around. But it's not, really.

<Edit> Obviously the guidelines can be used to justify any posting. "...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" would seem to include anything. But as a community, we don't discuss the intellectually stimulating points of Victorian literature. That's not really what HN is about.

If you read further in the guidelines, you'll see the point that makes this post off-topic: "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." This is exactly the type of story the local news channels run. </Edit>

It's fine to agree to disagree on this point. I believe Hacker News can and should be different from Reddit. It's certainly easy enough to find articles like this on Reddit or Huffington Post; why crowd out articles about gdb in favor of general news? Maybe the HN community would rather read general news here, which is fine as I only have one vote.

This is how I felt when first being informed that if I didn't go to first grade (it was a terrible school) my parents risked ending up in jail (maybe extreme, but I believed them when they said that.)

School was always about indoctrinating children to be "good little germans[1]", rather than educating them or teaching critical thinking... and it appears things have gotten much worse since I graduated.

I heard the other day a very young deaf child was punished or told to change her name because when she signs her name her fingers make a shape that is sorta like a gun.

And fingers in the shape of a "gun" is a violation of their "zero tolerance policy on weapons."

How can you expect kids to learn to be rational when this is the kind of irrationality you're subjecting them to on a day-to-day basis?

[1] eg: compliant unquestioning citizens

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