Redneck Nation (9 page)

So, my public school pals, if you’re trying to create another generation of citizens too dumb to figure out how high their
property taxes are, congratulations! You’re on a roll!

If the public schools were content not to teach my son math, that would be bad enough. But teaching him to feel great about
not knowing math, that’s going a little too far. According to a November 2001 report in
Personality and Social Psychology Review
, self-esteem among America’s youth has been on the rise for thirty years… along with
their weight, their drug use, their illiteracy, their pregnancy rates, and their level of sexually transmitted diseases.

But not their test scores.

Self-esteem based on nothing can set people up for disappointment, noted Dr. Jean Twenge of San Diego State University, who
made this archetypally northern statement to Reuters: “It is more important that a child actually accomplishes something than
that he or she have high self-esteem. Once a child accomplishes something, self-esteem will follow naturally. Children should
be praised, but only when the praise has a basis in fact.” Dr. Twenge went on to blame this disconnect between performance
and self-esteem on classroom techniques that teach children slogans and affirmations such as “I am lovable and capable.” “They
may also feel that the world owes them something,” Dr. Twenge said, and, as long as that “something” isn’t a real education,
we should be okay.

America: We’re ignorant, we’re uninformed… and we feel great about it! Sounds pretty southern to me.

But wait—fair is fair. When you spend $400 billion a year on schools, teachers, administrators, condoms, Mary Kate and Ashley
videos, etc., you’re going to get something for all that money. I don’t want to give the impression that our public schools
don’t transmit anything to our children other than self-esteem. America’s public schools do an extremely effective job of
inculcating some basic principles into our children.

Like racism. Since Slobodan Milosovic went out of business, no institution has done a better job of promoting racial division
and ethnic conflict than the American public school system. For example, if you haven’t been to
a government-run school lately, you probably didn’t know there was such a thing as Chinese math. No, really! Remember “Balancing
my checkbook is as hard as Chinese math”?

Well, it really exists and is taught at American public schools, along with Mexican math, African math, Italian math, and
Polish math, the latter consisting entirely of word problems ending with the phrase “to change a light-bulb?”

This educational approach is called ethnomathematics, which is part of the incredibly confusing new-new math movement (a.k.a.
“whole math”) that public schools have adopted just to make sure no children accidentally learn something by glancing casually
through their own textbooks. According to essayist John Leo, ethnomathematics teaches that “Western math… isn’t universal
but an expression of white male culture imposed on nonwhites.” One essay by an ethnomathematician written for public school
teachers refers to the “so-called Pythagorean Theorem,” as though the relationship between angles on a right triangle changes
with the ethnicity of the observer.

According to teacher’s guides made available with ethnomathematic texts, math class should accomplish goals like “prejudice
reduction; equitable pedagogy; and ensuring cultural equality and empowerment for students.” No mention of actually doing
math, but who’s got time when you’re studying how aboriginal tribesmen measure the floors of their grass huts?

Ethnomathematics is on an embarrassing par with “Ebonics,” except that Ebonics is a punch line and ethnomath is public school
policy. And doesn’t anybody care that black test scores on the SAT are lower for math than
they are for language? Black activists have long claimed that the SATs are culturally biased. Thoughtful Americans have replied,
“Maybe the verbal part, but how the heck can a binomial equation be racially insensitive?”

Well, now we know…

It turns out there is a national movement of ethnomodified education for our public school kids. Science, social studies,
foreign languages—all are learned differently by students based on their skin color. Some black activists are urging public
school systems to open black-only academies so that black children can be taught to multiply and divide from a black perspective.
In Oklahoma City, the Millwood public school system goes so far as to teach its children a Black Pledge of Allegiance:

We pledge allegiance of the red, black and green

Our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle,

And to the land we must obtain.

One nation of Black people,

With one God for us all,

Totally united in the struggle for Black Love,

Black Freedom, and Black determination.

So let’s see if I’ve got this straight: We run a public school system where the districts are drawn based on race. We use
education theory based on the idea that black and white children are inherently different and cannot be taught the same way.
Black children need to be taught in separate (but equal?) schools from white children where they can learn the principles
of racial loyalty. And all this is happening in public schools
outside
the South?

Somebody owes Governor Wallace an apology.

These obvious, indisputable criticisms of the current education system are dismissed as propaganda by opponents of what is
commonly called “school choice,” but is more accurately titled “a free-market school system.” I am a tireless and unashamed
advocate of such a system, due in part to the suffering I endured at the hands of the public schools.

I went to a school that, by any measure, was terrible. Too small for a football team, a choir, an orchestra, or even a school
newspaper, Pelion High School (which was also Pelion Middle and Pelion Elementary) offered the bare minimum of classes one
could take and still get a diploma from the academic acme that is the South Carolina Department of Education. We had but one
high school science teacher, who had to switch physics with chemistry every other year to accommodate graduation requirements.
Fortunately she was utterly incompetent in both, so nobody’s education suffered unfairly. Our one foreign language offering
was French, though the language skills of many of my classmates suggested that English might be considered an alternative.

Our French teacher was an earnest young woman who was very sincere about
la langue française
, but, “C’est dommage!”, she also had to teach social studies and junior high biology. As a result, my entire French vocabulary
consists of adolescent entendres revolving around the phrase “J’ai un grand stylo.”

When I went to college, I majored in music, played in the college jazz band, and sang in the opera program. But as a public
school student, I played in a band so small that my trombone and I were often half of the entire low brass
section, teamed up with a trumpet player pressed into service on a baritone.

It was a public school so bad that teachers and administrators openly acknowledged its badness. How could you deny it when
fewer than 10 percent of graduates were going to college and only half of your eighth graders were going on to graduate? There
were no advanced placement courses, no college-level credit courses, and the only targeted education courses of any kind involved
lathes and teachers with missing fingers.

The year I was graduated from Pelion High, our school had one of the lowest average SAT scores in the state of South Carolina,
which, in turn, had the very lowest SAT scores in the nation. It could be rationally argued, therefore, that I went to perhaps
the worst public school in America. And I went there for only one reason. Because I had to.

The government of the state of South Carolina—like the governments of Cleveland, Newark, and virtually every public school
system today—forces children to go to the local school to which they are assigned. And here’s the exquisitely stupid part,
the part that convinced me that the public school system is essentially a southern institution: Just a few miles away from
my house, in the opposite direction of Pelion, was Lexington High School. It was a big, new public school with a football
team and a real track team and an orchestra and several choirs and literature teachers who didn’t need emergency electrolysis.
It was everything my high school was not.

We Pelion students heard rumors about kids taking classes at Lexington that gave them partial credit at the University of
South Carolina. We saw news stories about
plays being performed there, even musicals with musicians from the South Carolina Philharmonic coming out as ringers. Some
people even said the cafeteria had a menu—you could actually choose what you had for lunch!

It was almost too much to be believed.

Here I was, trapped at Gomer & Goober High, but my family was paying the same taxes to the same school district with this
far superior school. If I could get my dad to drive me over every day, why couldn’t I go there? It seemed a reasonable proposition.

That’s when I learned what the American public school system was all about. My mother and I went to see my principal, an inept,
elderly woman named Mrs. Nichols. A part-time librarian with little experience, Mrs. Nichols earned the principal’s position
by demonstrating the unique management quality of being married to our former principal Mr. Nichols.

Mrs. Nichols insisted that it would be a bad thing for one of the few kids with test scores at or above the state average
to leave this fine institution of learning. She was not willing to sign the paperwork for me to leave, and the only other
person who could authorize such a move was the superintendent of the district. She mentioned that she might have his phone
number handy, being that they were relatives.

When pressed as to why I would be forbidden from attending a school that was clearly in my best interest, Mrs. Nichols (unintentionally)
articulated the fundamental structure upholding our public school system. She told me—and I am paraphrasing here—that if everyone
who wanted out of this second-rate educational hellhole were
allowed to escape, the school’s average daily attendance could drop so low that the school might be forced to close. And did
I think that there was some other school where Mrs. Nichols’s unique qualification would make her the principal? And where
would the underperforming teachers at Pelion High find gainful employment?

Or, as she put it far more succinctly, “Michael, if I let you leave, what about everyone else?”

Yes, what about “everyone else”? Everyone else gets screwed. Everyone else gets an education that would embarrass the average
student in Singapore or Sweden. Everyone else gets to become part of the collapsing test scores and widening knowledge gap
that are American youth culture.

But the teachers, incompetent and otherwise, remain gainfully employed. Their average salaries are on the rise, faster than
inflation. Meanwhile, class sizes continue to shrink. More money for more teachers to teach fewer children, but test scores
remain flat.

And, chances are, the children being miseducated by this system are more segregated by race and ethnicity than at any time
since 1970. They are being sorted by skin color, taught by skin color, tested by skin color, and if some education intellectuals
have their way, will be indoctrinated by skin color. All right here in America the Beautiful.

So tell me again how the
North
won the war? We must have missed that part in my high school history class.

It was taught, of course, by my basketball coach.

I
f Michael Jackson went to Bob Jones, whom would he be allowed to date?”

This was my question for Jonathan Pait, an able and affable gentleman who at the time had one of the worst jobs in America:
P.R. flak for Bob Jones University. I was interviewing him about BJU’s ban on interracial dating, and I asked him this question
to embarrass him. To his credit, it did.

I also asked it to show how foolish the race obsession at BJU became when scrutinized. Banning dating based on skin color
was such a ludicrous campus policy I couldn’t imagine how one went about defending it.

So I was taken aback when the articulate Mr. Pait began offering arguments for the defense that sounded eerily familiar. In
fact, they sounded like they’d been ripped from the editorial pages of the
New York Times
and the web pages of the NAACP. The more he spoke, the more it became clear that, far from being out of the mainstream of
American thought on the issue of race, the quirky backwater campus of BJU was at the forefront.

In fact, everything America believes about race it learned from Bob Jones.

Not that the theoretical mating status of Michael Jackson isn’t a difficult question for the folks at BJU. First, there was
the ban on interracial dating. Then there was the public confusion over Jackson’s sexuality in general. So, even after the
administration decided whether or not Michael Jackson is technically represented by the NAACP, they would still have to divine
whether Holy Scripture allows God-fearing women to date Diana Ross.

When you’re in the talk radio biz as I am, having a local institution like Bob Jones is manna from heaven. Their fourth-rate,
irrational theology is a font of embarrassing press coverage. Every few weeks some former student would profess an unnatural
lust for his fellow man and show up at a BJU Bible study under the threat of arrest, or some negligent theology student would
inadvertently set one of his snakes loose on the general campus population, etc., etc.