February 21, 2006
Postponing Reality
By Thomas
Sowell
Let's face
it: Reality can be stressful and can sometimes get very rough.
Everyone has an incentive to postpone it. Most of us, however,
learn the hard way that postponing reality only makes it far worse
than facing it early on.
The problem
gets more complicated in politics, where one set of people has
the power to postpone facing reality and a different set of people
have to pay the price later on.
Our educational
system is a classic example. Nothing is easier than to lower the
standards today, avoiding all sorts of problems that arise with
students and their parents when higher standards are imposed.
Today's
"educators" can simply pass the students along to the
next grade and eventually send them out into the world with nice-looking
diplomas and little else to enable them to cope with the complexities
and challenges of work and of life. These students then pay big
time for the rest of their lives.
California
is one of a number of states that has belatedly begun to recognize
what a disaster this policy has been. In 1999 a law was passed
saying that students would receive a diploma only if they could
pass a standard test to show that they had some real knowledge,
instead of just an acceptable attendance record.
These tests
do not require genius. We're talking basic math and English. We're
talking multiple choice questions where the passing grade is 55
percent -- and you can get 25 percent by just guessing.
Like other
states with high school graduation exams, California has postponed
forcing students to pass that exam as a condition for receiving
the diploma. This year, the state has decided that it is finally
going to enforce this law passed in 1999.
Maybe it
will and maybe it won't. Attorney Arturo Gonzalez has filed a
lawsuit to stop this graduation requirement from being enforced.
The requirement
is not "fair," Mr. Gonzalez says. The schools where
a high percentage of the students don't pass the test are predominantly
low-income and minority schools.
This is
not to say that most of the students in predominantly low-income
and minority schools do not pass. It is just that the schools
where fewer than 70 percent pass are predominantly low-income
minority schools.
Are these
tests "fair"? Of course not. Life itself is not "fair"
in the sense of offering equal chances of succeeding in any kind
of endeavor.
It is hard
even to imagine how life could conceivably be "fair"
in the sense of equal chances of doing specific things, when there
are so many factors at work differently for each person.
Different
families and different cultures produce different habits, different
values, different behavior patterns. They don't even want the
same things to the same degree, much less have a willingness to
sacrifice to the same extent to get those things.
The only
kind of fairness we can hope for is applying the same rules and
the same standards to everyone.
It certainly
wasn't fair, in Mr. Gonzalez's sense of the word, for the schools
I attended as a child to require me to take the same tests as
children from families with more than twice as much education
and several times as much income.
What would
have happened if the schools had been "fair" to me in
that sense? I would have learned less, had a much easier time
in school -- and would have gone out into the world not even knowing
enough to realize how little I knew.
By now,
I might have been on welfare or in prison. But my teachers would
have felt good about themselves for giving a poor boy from the
ghetto a break.
Admittedly,
at the time I didn't always appreciate all the heavy stuff my
tough teachers were laying on me. But, at the time, I also didn't
know that the world was going to be a lot tougher than school
if I didn't learn.
Fortunately,
those teachers were not into "fairness" and there was
no Mr. Gonzalez around to file lawsuits to protect me from having
to meet the same standards as everybody else.
Reality
had to be confronted early on, not postponed.
Copyright
2006 Creators Syndicate
