One’s political ideology should not become a cult.
The text for today’s sermon against cults is a post about a curious case of child sacrifice.
In Alex Tabarrok’s first sentence he links to a 2016 article in The New York Times by one Nikole Hannah-Jones, “Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City.” Economist Tabarrok, blogging yesterday at Marginal Revolution, explains that Ms. Hannah-Jones “sent her child to a predominantly black/lower-income public school in New York City. Now her child says she shouldn’t have been used as political fodder.”
What Hannah-Jones did was send her daughter to a failing public school to somehow advance social justice. She could have sent her daughter to a school with a better curriculum, better teachers, and better fellow students, but to serve her woke ideology, she subjected her own child to a terrible education.
A decade later she and Najya, her daughter, finally confronted the consequences of that choice, the lackluster learning being just the first half of it: “Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”
And the psychic toll was worse.
Tabarrok swiftly undermines the initial assumptions going into the schooling choice,* concluding with an astute analysis of our times: “It’s been said that Ayn Rand’s heroes don’t exist, but her villains do. . . Hannah-Jones says that she and her husband ‘felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good.’ But she wasn’t just sacrificing herself for her ideology; she was sacrificing her child, who had no choice in the matter.”
That’s the operative word in education, no? Choice. Schooling decisions aren’t easy. Even parents with education, intelligence, and resources can make mistakes. Sometimes ideological ones. With our system failing, at whopping tens of thousands spent per pupil, please consider that sacrificing individual kids doesn’t really serve the collective good.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* “The failures she documents are failures of management and accountability, not lack of resources. NYC spends upwards of $40k per pupil on average, the highest of any large district in the country. Moreover, schools in NYC with lower-income students get more than the average. PS 307, where NHJ initially sent her child, is currently funded at just over 52k per student, far above the national average.”
Illustration created with Grok Imagine
See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts
