Failure is a better teacher than success.
When you fail you, most of the time, know why. When you succeed, you don’t know if you’re lucky or good.
Failing helps people learn to work hard, it helps people grow, it is good for us. You cannot celebrate a triumph if there was no struggle.
We have forgotten this. In the age of feelings, we don’t want anyone to feel bad, or sad, or less than. So the Left has decided to eliminate failure.
The latest is our focus on equity, Equity at its heart is about equal outcomes, not equal opportunities. But the focus on equity is only going to lead to more inequality.
The Federalist had a piece on this last week.
Last week, it came to light that the Virginia Department of Education is considering restructuring math in a way that could reduce opportunities for some students to take advanced math in the name of equity. White and Asian students take advanced math classes more than black and Latino students, and some see this as proof that it’s racist. Instead of seeking ways to raise the enrollment of underrepresented groups in advanced classes, some state leaders appear to believe it may be better to drop all groups down to the same level.
Unfortunately, the Virginia Department of Education isn’t an outlier. Under the guise of social justice, other districts have also taken aim at advanced programs, notably New York City, Seattle, and San Francisco. As Rachel Blustain explains in NBC news, these programs were accused of “creating a caste system by assigning students to remedial, average or advanced classes before they’d had a chance to develop their academic potential.” Yet advanced and Gifted and Talented programs are unequal by design, and they might deny learning opportunities for students enrolled in the lower-level classes.
In other words, in order to help low-performing students do better, these schools made high-performing students do worse.
That’s equity. And it’s insulting.
It would be one thing, and correct to say this is the racism of low expectations. ‘These kids aren’t smart enough, so don’t expect too much from them.’ But it’s also worth pointing out that there are many people in education, and on the Left, who want to punish children of privilege. Those would be white and Asian kids.
National Review hit upon the same theme.
If you wanted to be blunt about it, you might call equity a no-excuses imperative to eliminate all collective racial inequalities. There are many such inequalities in our system, and blacks are on the unenviable side of most of them. They possess the fewest financial assets, fare the worst in school, have the hardest time finding work, live the shortest lives, commit the most violent crime, and spend the most time in jail. Equity’s proponents, most of them progressive Democrats, say their aim is to ensure that all races share equally in economic growth and get a fair shake in the justice system. Republicans say that Democrats are abandoning equality of opportunity for equality of result.
Be blunt. Call this focus on equity what it is. Equity is about tearing down the old idea that America is about what you do. Instead, its proponents want to make this into a country that does things for you.
Equity is derived from so-called critical race theory, which came to public attention when Donald Trump denounced it as a “malign ideology” last campaign season (after giving it a home in his administration for three and a half years, though that is another story). Critical race theory is a varied set of perspectives on a varied set of issues. But there is one thing that seems to run through all of it: non-neutrality. Starting in the 1990s, critical-race scholars noticed that “color blindness” and the “level playing field” and “objective measurements” were doing little to close the gaps between blacks and others.
But because the focus is on equity, there is no consideration of why those gaps aren’t closing.
It’s not because of system racism, it’s largely because of choice.
Failing to graduate high school, having children out of wedlock, having no skills or a low skill job, turning to drugs, or crime, or simply slipping off into an abyss of nothingness is not a problem for just black people. There are lots of people who lose their lives to the blah of poor decisions.
We should be teaching young people the success sequence. We should be teaching them hard work. We should be teaching skills, and dedication, and a commitment to excellence. Instead, equity is teaching generations that nothing is ever their fault.
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