A couple of King's guests produced particularly incisive nuggets. Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the Washington, DC public schools, has been criticized mercilessly for firing 241 poor-performing teachers. Rhee may lose her job when DC's next mayor takes office -- her current boss, Adrian Fenty, lost the Democratic primary two weeks ago -- but she remains unapologetic:
"...it was not particularly popular. But the thing that we have to remember is that, you know, we're not a jobs program. We are not here for the comfort and the security of adults. We are here to educate children. We have a responsibility to them and to them alone. And so if we have to take some actions that makes some adults unhappy, but it's going to benefit kids in the end, we have to do those things."The inimitable Ben Stein, an economist best-known as a speechwriter for presidents Nixon and Ford, approached from a different direction:
Later, Stein took another tack across the same bearing:"My thought is that the education crisis is a cultural crisis in this entire country.
"I don't see these kids in the low-income schools, I've never taught in one. I taught for many years in universities with well-to-do white kids, and even there there's a crisis of learning.
"The culture just does not value learning, knowledge, self-discipline, rigor, as much as it should. It values other things, but in much of the population, it just does not value learning and hard work.
"There's never been an educational system so bad that a well-intentioned, hard-working motivated kid could not get an education. There are libraries, there's the Internet. But there's a cultural crisis where people are told that it's not worthwhile to be a learned and hard-working person."
I present these snippets not to make a particular point, necessarily, simply as examples of critical thought on a tough subject."...we are a very great country, but we have a lot of problems with the culture of the country."
"...long ago, there were some freed African-American slaves who worked and worked and worked and worked, and got into Harvard and got into Columbia and got into Princeton. So those kids had the right ability to do that.
"Now there are white kids from the suburbs who don't bother to learn to read and write. It's all a matter of motivation.
"And one thing I noticed from this discussion endlessly is we blame the teachers, blame the teachers, blame the teachers, and I'm sure many of them deserve blame, but we don't ever say, why don't the kids wake up and smell the coffee and say, look, it's up to us to do some work. It's up to us to go to the library and maybe get some books out and educate ourselves."
Sharp people, sharp observations -- and no pandering.
