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Back to the Forum Archives I though the separate but equal kind of nonsense was debunked in Brown V Board of Education years ago. Chief Justice Earl Warren had it right. Separate is, by definition, not equal. In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled 9 to 0 that racial segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. It would seem this ruling overturned, once and for all, the "separate but equal" doctrine that came out of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. It ain't necessarily so! Now some schools in Michigan are planning to have separate classes for girls and boys. Will someone have to sue again? Why do these fools keep beating the same dead horse? They will say, "Yes, but this is different. It's good for the girls. The girls will not be distracted. They will learn better." I say, if segregation is good for the girls, why not send them all to a nunnery? It's not good. It is blatant segregation. Segregation isolates the kids from the very real social experiences that are a very real part of the educational process. If they go all the way through k-12 education on a separate track, they will graduate as emotional cripples. They will not be equipped to function normally in the adult culture. They will not have gotten all of the girl growing pains out of the way. They will still have to do it, belatedly. They will be socially inept until they go through it. They will cause pain and dismay, to themselves and to the luckless men they encounter. The same thing will happen to the boys who are segregated. They will not have learned how to function with the opposite sex. They will be clumsy and careless. They will cause pain, to themselves and to others. It will not be intentional. It will be because they have not learned in a safe controlled environment how to behave with women. These separate track fools have it in their heads that public education is about the three Rs and only that. Reading, writing, and arithmetic is just a tiny part of the educational process. If that were all of it, we would not need public schools. Mothers used to teach those things in the home. Some still try it to the detriment of their kids. When you isolate kids and put them in a limited social environment, they will become emotional cripples. The public schools provide a very rich controlled social environment. That is where the real learning takes place. It's not all in the classroom, with the teacher and the principal force feeding the three Rs to the hapless kids. It is the kids interacting together that provides the necessary growing up. That is how the kids learn to become whole healthy social beings. That is how they evolve from dependant children into functioning adults. That is how it should happen. I will be the first to point out our public schools are not perfect. They could be a great deal better. Right now, too many of our kids quit in disgust, boredom, or confusion. Others graduate without the basic knowledge they need to function in the adult culture. We will not improve that problem by creating special situations. To improve education, we need to look at the results of what we do and devise teaching techniques that will give better results. We need to urge the teachers to think about the kid as unique individuals. We need to have them think about what they are trying to do. Segregating the kids won't do that. Creating artificial situations won't do it. Treating the kids as human beings would help a great deal. Some so called progressive people have said we treat our kids as second class citizens. I will say, if we treated them as second class citizens that would be a great deal better than what we actually do. Most of the time, we treat them as though they had no citizenship or rights at all. Convicted criminals get better treatment that we sometimes give our kids. We treat them as things to be manipulated, molded, and made into standard products. Then we have the unmitigated gall to tell them we are doing it for their own good. They know that's a lie. We do it to make it easier on ourselves. We push them around and bully them to keep them from bothering us with questions. It is easier to treat the kids as objects than to treat them as thinking human beings. There is no routine procedure for treating with thinking humans. That kind of situation demands that we be flexible. Heaven forbid! But, we could at least try to adapt our methods to the kids needs and capabilities. And, we could try to respond to their curiosity and the resultant questions. We could try to be less rigid in our procedures. For example, it is quite legitimate to make our kids understand there is a logical progression to learning. We cannot learn addition and subtraction if we do not understand counting. The kids won't have any problem with that unless we begin to use it as a copout, such as, you're too young to understand that. Unless we can show them why, it's a copout. Age is irrelevant. Only experience counts. The kids either have the necessary background or they don't. If they don't, we should be able to explain what's missing. If we cannot, it is not the kid who does not understand, it's us. Separating kids will not solve that problem. Segregation of
any kind is never good in a democratic culture. It's nothing
more that a sleight of hand maneuver to cover our failure. Kids
are born smart and they can learn to function in a mixed society
if we just provide the safe environment and let it happen. End
of case!
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