General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: A 13-Year-Old's Slavery Analogy Raises Some Uncomfortable Truths in School [View all]CreekDog
(46,192 posts)in and of itself, her point about disparate treatment, lack of proper education leading to lack of empowerment has some validity.
this is where things get messy:
when you look at race, class, poverty, inequities, you will have to tolerate ambiguity sometimes.
so i read the essay and i don't see criticism of teachers but of the circumstances of the a system that overcrowds, underfunds, overtests and blames teachers for the poverty of their students which are the fault of society --not the schoolteacher who is probably doing more to change those inequities than many.
and i don't have to give any quarter to some right wing education association to see that her point has some validity --and to accept that, hey, she's 13, this is how the world looks to her in some respects.
so i took the essay's excerpts at face value, and the core idea that the lack of a proper education can lead to a population without power or the means to get it, that in this modern age, has some relationship to the lack of power slaves had in the society of their time.
this comparison is what it is. unless they aren't her words and her experiences aren't her experiences or observations, then there is something to them. and i'm not going to blame some 40k-65k/year inner city teacher for those problems when we have decades of other things that brought discrimination and poverty to her world and it's the latter i want to see fixed.