She worked hard to become
a teacher, a black female in a male dominated field; Lauren got her doctorate
in biology at a time when few people wanted to stay in college and graduate
school so long, it was easier to go out into the world and make money. Few
wanted to teach because the pay was low, the hours were long, and parents
seldom expressed gratitude to good teachers for a job well done.
Professorships on the
other hand were paid much better and hard to come by - one had to be a die-hard
liberal with socialist or Marxist leanings. But the work load was much easier – five hours
a week in the office, teach 3 classes, attend the self-aggrandizing lecture and
conference circuit, develop a “I love myself” resume, have graduate students to
grade students’ exams and/or teach during the professor’s scholarly absence,
and he/she had it made. But Lauren was not that kind of person, she was too
conservative and conscientious for that, she was passionate about her work, her
students, and it showed. She chose to teach gifted students.
A petite and graceful
black woman, Lauren was outraged by affirmative action, a payback for the
slavery of the past. She was bothered that the public could attribute her well-deserved
success not to her hard work but to the color of her skin. Lauren wanted
affirmative action to end, it had a good run, she used to say.
Lauren hid her conservative
values - she only shared her views with few friends and relatives. It was
un-American in the South to be black, a female, single, a teacher, and not be
Democrat and a union member.
Before her premature death
from skin cancer two years ago, Lauren worried about the direction our country
was taking. She was upset by the academic monopoly liberals had around the
country in all universities. She feared that race baiters and trouble makers
who were inciting race division and class warfare would devastate the middle
class and particularly the black middle class.
The government was doing a
pretty good job of destroying the black family by becoming welfare daddy to millions
of unwed black young women. Who needed a daddy to stay around and take
responsibility for the life they’ve created when the financial rewards from
government dole were greater in single households? Yet the children, boys
especially, desperately needed fathers as role models to keep them away from
crime.
The millions of abortions
since Roe v. Wade saddened Lauren because many of the aborted babies were black
babies. Planned Parenthood was thriving by killing the innocent unborn,
teaching mothers-to-be that fetuses were an inconvenience and a choice.
Lauren ran an activities
center associated with her church to steer young men and women in the right
direction and keep them out of trouble. She also ran the donation center that
raised money to pay for scholarships for black kids in the community. She never
married or had children of her own but she had many students and neighbors
whose kids needed advice and help with homework.
Every year, liberal
academics invented new teaching methods, models, and adopted new goals to
advance their agenda, defining and redefining themselves. They were social
engineers, social justice enforcers, manipulators, and imposers. Parents and
the public were paying scant attention – everyone was too distracted by life,
work, family, entertainment, and sports. Nobody was “watching the watchers.”
Lauren wanted to visit
Africa someday, not because she considered herself African American, she always
said, “I’ve never been to Africa, I was not born there, how can I be African
American? I was born in the South; I am American through and through.” But
there was a curiosity flaming inside her to visit a place that seemed so alien
and foreign to her yet so many considered themselves more African than American
although they had never set foot in Africa.
She was a prophetic visionary
in her own way, fearing and worrying about the future because she witnessed the
opportunity to succeed in this country after college become dimmer for all
groups. The opportunity for the American dream, which is what brought millions
of immigrants to this country, was growing more distant.
Lauren’s role model was
George Washington Carver (1864-1943), “The Black Leonardo,” a genial scientist,
inventor, botanist, and educator. He thrived at a time in history when it was
very hard for a black man to succeed, especially the son of slaves born in
Missouri in 1864.
Lauren’s lab walls were
covered with posters about Carver’s accomplishments in alternative crops such
as peanuts, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and how he taught farmers to rotate crops
in order to avoid the devastating effects of cotton crop-destroying boll
weevils. Among the many products made from peanuts he developed and promoted
were cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, and nitroglycerin.
During one of her conference
tours, Lauren visited Ames, Iowa because that is where Carver studied botany,
at Iowa State Agricultural College. He received his B.S. and Master’s degree in
plant pathology and mycology in Ames and was the first black faculty member
there. Booker T. Washington, the first principal and president of the Tuskegee
Institute, invited Carver in 1896 to be the head of its Agriculture Department -
he taught there for 47 years.
Lauren would have been
terribly disappointed and heartbroken to see how things have changed in the
last five years and how fast. All the progress made since the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling,
requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of “separate
but equal” and its subsequent repudiation in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education, is now being reversed by the Common Core
national standards imposed around the country in education. She worked so hard
to shape and inspire the next generation of black teachers, biologists, zoologists,
botanists, doctors, and researchers!
Sending white and black
students to separate but unequal schools harmed children in so many ways, not
the least being the undisputed fact that it made black students feel inferior. The
federal Common Core bases standards on race and holds minority students to a
lower standard from K-12. Is this not discriminatory, harmful to students, and
labeling them into separate but unequal groups for the rest of their education?
Why dumb down education even more?
It is embarrassing when
the MSM glorifies an obviously mal-educated young woman who speaks Ebonics and
cannot read cursive writing, excusing her glaring lack of education as
something hip. It is a sad example of the state of education today when social
promotion has become the norm and semi-literate people receive degrees.
The Tuscaloosa News
reported that “Beginning this fall, Alabama public schools will be under a new
state-created academic accountability system that sets different goals for
students in math and reading, based on their race, economic status, ability to
speak English and disabilities.” Alabama’s
Plan 2020, adopted in November 2010 and replacing the No Child Left Behind, has
different standards for American Indians, Asian/Pacific Islanders, blacks,
English language learners, Hispanics, multi-racial students, students below the
poverty level, special education, and whites. http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20130630/NEWS/130629743
Lauren would have been
proud that The Alabama Federation of Republican Women strongly opposes “race-based
standards in student achievement” but sad that education in this country has
fallen so low.
We’ve moved from our
stellar education system prior to the establishment of the Department of
Education in 1979-80 under Jimmy Carter to “everyone is a winner” education, to
“let’s be more sensitive to illegals” education, to “let’s coexist” education, “to
let’s shove sex education, condoms on bananas, abortion pills, and sexual
preferences down our throats” education, to “let’s dumb down education and
graduate everyone as idiots” education, to “let’s worship Gaia and
environmental stewardship” education, to the current Common Core values of “let’s
graduate everyone who gives wrong answers in math and everything else as long
as they can explain how they got the wrong answer and feel good about it”
education. http://www.libertynews.com/2013/07/unbelievable-common-core-shill-says-new-education-does-not-require-students-to-have-right-answers-only-that-they-explain-how-they-got-answer/
My suggestion would be to place
all these liberal educators who are eager to adopt Common Core standards on an
airplane, in a building, or on a bridge designed by students who were taught
that it does not matter that they got wrong answers, all that matters are the
feelings and the explanations how they arrived at the wrong answers. Still, if
they don’t understand what they are doing to public education, perhaps liberal
teachers should undergo laser surgery performed by a graduate of Common Core
standards or take drugs developed and measured by such students.
No comments:
Post a Comment