In keeping with the unorthodox nature of this book, I feel that most if its material is of a racist nature. Frankly, I find it offensive. As I mentioned in my last posting, these guys were just out to sell books. So naturally they would write about offensive things.
With this chapter though, they began to redeem themselves with me. I completely concur with their position that there is not a black-white test gap but a bad-school/good-school gap (CPS study). More interesting was that the difference between the two types of schools was based on PTA involvement/funding not on government funding. Also, the children who entered the lottery to get into the good schools were actually the students who cared about their education. It didn't matter what color they were, they were good students. Those children in the bad schools had worse grades because they were in the bad schools not because they were black, the whites in those schools had bad grades as well.
The earlier part of the chapter was on the paranoia of parents these days. They may have been right but they didn't need to attack that. The parents are only concerned with the well-being of their kids. The authors should have made a larger assault on the marketers and news media instead of just mentioning them as part of the problem. I myself am a marketer; I understand these things. People individually are very intelligent. In a group however they are not; the larger the group gets, the lower the intelligence goes. This is a psychological concept called groupthink. Look at it this way, its a lot easier to spook a herd of cows than just one. The marketers and news media capitalize on that ideology. Think back on all the times the entire television news industry focused on dangerous occurrances that really only happened a couple of times.
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3 comments:
I agree the media has a lot of influence on our youth. Actually too much influence. They dicatte whats pretty and skinny. They create mountains into mole hills and discourage individuality. They try skew everthing they write and therefor a half trth is told.
I don't agree Americans are intelligent. It is a shame that the average American only has a high school education. I think that American are lazy and take advantage of teh society we live in. Very few people research they get involved in the media's group think hypnosis, because they don't know and don't have teh ambition to learn any better.
Your view on group think was very insightful. People are much smarter by themselves than in a large group. Your example of the ease in scaring a single cow versus scaring a herd of cows was excellent. This is how things work in life. You can also see excellent examples of this in the stock market. During rallies and sell offs there is so much group think going on would think that you are watching a herd of cattle. The media also does a great job in taking advantage of the group think phenomena. The news is always attempting to scare people into thinking one way or another.
I got the same feeling as you when I read this chapter. I really believe the study that its the schools that affect the kids the most. It does not have to do with the race of these children. The authors really brought up a great statistic when they explained that blacks and whites test around the same in bad schools. I do believe that there is a certain amount of accountabliity on the student and how hard they work, but I think these students are put in really bad situations. It is much harder to have the mentality to work hard in school when you go to a school that has no order.
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