The pleasure of seeing Lebron James, a pompous, entitled, smug, illiterate roundball player being pilloried for his arrogance in thinking that his money and face was sufficient to create some sort of little Harvard on the Cuyahoga is delicious. But this miserable situation exposes the horrendous state of American education, and proves that the mantra of the teachers and their hard-left unions that money will fix everything is an evil, craven strategy to enrich them at the expense of the country and its children.
LeBron James’s school of failed promises
NBA megastar LeBron James once said, “being black in America is tough.” If that’s true, then his “I Promise School” has made it even tougher. The students at the school, 60% of whom are black, cannot pass state-issued math tests. Not one eighth grade student passed an arithmetic test in three years, according to reports. It’s an embarrassment and unmitigated disaster for James, who has been a frequent know-it-all and outspoken critic on social issues.
The news of the “I Promise School” was initially met with great fanfare when it opened in 2018. The school benefited from a trove of resources from one of the country’s wealthiest celebrities. Stories of how great the kids were doing dominated the news initially. James was heralded as a hero. But just a couple of years after it opened its doors, it failed to uphold its most basic responsibility: educate children. James’s educational initiative quickly unraveled into a school of failed promises.
Many of us are the descendants of immigrants who came to this country with literally nothing. They were thrown into the melting pot of late 19th and early 20th century America, without benefit of a massive welfare state. Yet the public schools were able to educate these people, most of whom didn’t even speak English! They became productive members of society, and their children and grandchildren became doctors and lawyers and accountants and engineers. The American education system worked; and it worked well! It was bare-bones in most places…yet kids learned to read and write and do math and were taught civics and history and geography…all without benefit of computers and child psychologists and gender assessment guides and condom use classes. And those teachers? They were expected to look, dress and behave appropriately. No blue-haired, pierced and tatted freaks grooming eight-year olds to be the latest flavor of sexual and social dysfunction.
But along the way, courtesy of the insanity of the 1960s, our education system was turned on its head, and the techniques that had educated millions were no longer considered acceptable, for many opaque reasons, but of course the real reason was that it was traditional, and it worked.
But black America got a double shot of failure, as LBJ’s Great Society took the burgeoning black middle class and turned it into a dependent, passive, democrat-voting pressure group whose children no longer had the benefit of strong social connections via two-parent households, church and school.
The results were predictable.
[Hat Tip: dhmosquito]
The list of black America’s ills is long and painful, and our education system has spent 50 years doing nothing to fix anything on that list. So buying the best that a failed system can offer is itself a recipe for failure, which is why Lebron James’ vanity project is a catastrophe.
What’s the solution? It’s long and painful and requires the destruction of most of higher education, which is the source for most of the nonsense going on in our K-12 public schools. Until education majors are taught reading and writing and ‘rithmatic, along with history and civics; nothing will change. Until post-modern, woke insanity is banished from public education; nothing will change. Until the teachers unions are destroyed; nothing will change.
And for black America, until education is valued more than three-point shots and rapping; nothing will change.
