Sensible thoughts from syndicated columnist William Rasberry: “Kids won’t learn if we expect failure”:

Too many of us — and not, by any means, just teachers — have accepted that many of our children really cannot learn very much. We bemoan that fact. We are deeply sorry that it’s true, and we are handy with a grocery list of culprits. But fundamentally, we believe that the children of what is called the underclass can’t learn.

Paige sees the evidence for this belief (which we seldom acknowledge out loud) in our resistance to national testing and national (and international) standards.

I see it more pervasively. America’s black leaders, back in the day, took it as their key responsibility to get us ready to compete in an unfair world. Today’s leadership, or so it seems to me, sees its primary responsibility as protesting the unfairness.

The difference is between remedying underperformance and merely explaining it.

When [Secretary of Education Rod] Paige and I were boys, explanations of black disadvantage were so obvious as to be pointless. The thing our people needed, our leaders kept reminding us, was to do well in spite of the disadvantage, to become productive, to make ourselves necessary. Today’s leaders put less emphasis on what we must do and more on what is done to us.

They aren’t wrong. But the unintended consequence of their emphasis is to make us feel more like powerless victims of circumstances we can’t control and less like individuals capable of significant achievement.

Wait, you mean a culture that embraces victimization is a culture that produces more and more victims? Why, that’s absurd! It would mean (…”carry the four…”) that the operative variable in this equation is the embracing and not the victimhood (which itself may or may not be real). Which means in turn that — should we embrace only the highest standards — we’d likely produce more and more kids who strive for…higher standards…?

But that can’t be. It’s too simple. There must be deeper causes at issue here. Mustn’t there?

Otherwise, what’s to keep me from shooting sociologists on sight?