“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
Looks like the educational system in Germany and many other European countries
As always, the devil’s in the details. You may want to read up!
Yes, the US public education system was modeled on that of Prussia.
@marvin100 care to offer a link where I can read up about school choice not including public schools? I’d really like to see the details you are speaking of.
Not very surprising considering the modern US public school systems as we know it were modeled after the Prussian public school system in the mid-late 19th century.
Here’s one piece, @3scoutsmom :
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/will-betsy-devos-focus-school-choice-mean-public-education/
Here are a couple more:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/19/school-choice-is-great-betsy-devoss-vision-for-school-choice-is-not/?utm_term=.6d82cb5ef077
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-02-09/betsy-devos-school-choice-to-do-list
http://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/2017/02/07/education-secretary-betsy-devos-on-school-choice-vouchers-and-religion.html
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/betsy-devos-christian-schools-vouchers-charter-education-secretary
@Marvin100 none of those links said school choice would not include other public schools, many of them explicitly said that PUBLIC charter schools will be a part of school choice. Please quote where public schools will be excluded from school choice.
There are important distinctions between charter schools and public schools (not the least being unionization and oversight), but I honestly wasn’t making an argument about the specifics of her plans, just pointing out that the details are what matters in complex policy like this. We don’t yet really know what the policy will be, to be honest, so those of us who are interested will have to keep paying attention 
It’s ironic you’re complaining about the Wilson quote, when you more than just about any other person on this forum, is in favor of exactly that type of tracked education system based on standardized test scores and grades, from an early age.
and what happens, @roethlisburger , to all of the “dumb” kids? Even if discipline is enforced, many kids in inner cities do not have the family support system or values to pass on. These kids rarely do their homework and they don’t care… Their best chance is if they get quality after-school programs, including tutoring, but also with meaningful activities.
In many public schools, racial imbalance is getting worse every year. Single parent families are more common than not. Too many schools have 90% or more of the kids getting free breakfast and lunch, they still have high truancy rates, and the highest ranking kids may get straight A’s on a curve, but still only get 1100 SAT scores. Graduation rates are under a third, because poverty rates are soaring. Literacy is terrible - yet kids are passed from year to year. Kids who can’t read at close to grade level, have extra difficulty with doing homework. If you can’t read well, it is almost impossible to do well in Algebra.
The problems are far bigger than simple school vouchers would address.
And why limit it to the dumb kids? Why not cease educating the ugly? The disabled? The poor? And don’t get me started on those sinister southpaws…
@gmfreedom my sister and parents attended HBCUs because of the substantial scholarships they were offered, not because they were fleeing diversity. I also received full-rides to the HBCUs I applied to, but was lucky enough to be offered a substantial scholarship to another top institution that I chose to attend instead. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to blanket every black person’s reason for attending a certain school, because you are not in all of our heads.
People love to ask “why are all the black kids sitting together?” but tend to not ask the corollary: “why are the white kids doing the same?”
Re: #50
Indeed, the observation can be turned around to ask why so few non-black people consider historically black schools. For example, Florida State (not historically black) and Florida A&M (historically black) have a joint engineering division. Florida A&M costs less and has better scholarships, but most of the engineering enrollment comes from Florida State, where students pay more for the same engineering education.
I’m not in favor of deliberately allocating “liberal education” solely for one class and denying it to others as Wilson’s speech advocates. Especially considering the subtext of his statement is that the former were meant for an elite socio-economic elite as he perceived it.
Perceptions which were strongly shaped by the social ideal of feudalistic hierarchy popular among the southern White elite of his generation and earlier.
Also, keep in mind that the idea of tracking by test scores/grades would have been considered an exceedingly radical idea and one most southern elites of the period…along with most of their aristocratic European counterparts would vehemently oppose as their idea of merit was based on wealth and what social class/group one/one’s family belonged…not the merits of one’s intellect or demonstrated academic performance. Why that would be “too common” or “bourgeois” in their view during that period.
A terrific interview with a real expert. Fascinating and eye-opening.
Whether you like it or not, dumbness is relevant to educability in ways that ugliness, disability, poverty, and handedness are not.
I’m an educator, @sorghum , and with some severe exceptions (at both extreme ends), I can safely say that every kid is educable. More seriously, how do you identify “intelligence”? It doesn’t even have a consensus definition, and if you like IQ tests, well, it’s quite possible to study for them. There’s an enormous body of work on this kind of tracking, and it’s largely fallen out of favor. People with real expertise who have real bodies of research and real empirical data haven’t come to any consensus on any of the things your advocating: educability, intelligence, or tracking.
^Maybe you should read my actual comment before you assume what I am or am not advocating.
I am an educator, and I recognize that there are dumb kids and genius kids. I have not suggested, here, what approaches should be taken to deal with that.
To TheAtlantic’s point - I attended an HBCU partially because that’s where I got the largest scholarship and partially because the environment was an extremely empowering one for me as a young black first-generation college student. I’ve mentioned this before, but Spelman was the first place I met a black woman with a PhD - I remember my first college professor being this black sociologist I so admired that I decided then and there I wanted to get a PhD of my own and investigate social issues (and I did!). Before that I didn’t even know black PhDs existed. And due to my education at an HBCU, I know so many black doctors, engineers, lawyers, and other professionals in my network that the idea of a black person being a highly-educated professional is not out of the ordinary. I know I can do it because I have peer and senior role models who are alumnae of my college and other HBCUs, so nothing really seems out of my reach. It expanded my mind as to what black people can do in American society.
I think many of these factors are why HBCUs are disproportionately responsible for educating black scientists, engineers, and others in careers that black folks are underrepresented in.
I gotta say, though, I have mixed feelings about this statement (and about Betsy DeVos in general). On the one hand, it’s great to see people praising HBCUs for the contributions they’ve made to American society. On the other hand, I don’t like the language slipped in there - “rather than focus solely on funding…” I mean, she’s right that structural reforms are necessary, but structural reforms are expensive and part of the problem with public schooling is decisions and rulings that get handed down with no funding attached to them. I feel that potentially, she’s also ignoring the fact that about half of the HBCUs are actually public universities created or acquired by their states to educate black students. And yeah, making this about school choice is ridiculous. This wasn’t a school choice issue - HBCUs were created because black students were literally not allowed to attend most institutions of higher ed in the U.S.
Great comment, @juillet - thanks for sharing!
Just a question, but does it bother any of you who are talking about what an idiot DeVos is that the “offending” passage is in the present tense? For what it is worth, this is why examples like drinking fountains and the negro leagues are inopposite. They might be relevant if the Negro leagues existed today as an option instead of MLB, or if there were everybody water fountains and black only water fountains. But manifestly we are not in the same place circa 2017 as 1917 as it relates to minority admission to colleges.
To me it is not such a crazy idea to say that HBCUs (or women’s colleges for that matter) as they exist in the current climate are an expression of “more options” that help students flourish?
I really don’t understand the argument except in the simplistic she said x but really meant y, and y proves she is a racist/dummy.
I also don’t have a problem with the first part of her statement. Can any of you actually posit a clear and coherent argument that the actual words used in the actual statement, to wit that there were “too many students in America who did not have equal access to education. They saw that the system wasn’t working, that there was an absence of opportunity, so they took it upon themselves to provide the solution” is wrong? And yes, I read the argument that the “system was actualy working as intended” but that is not all together accurate. The constitution prohibits race based discrimination. Any such discrimination is then not the system working as intended.
I am not really a DeVos fan (like on most things in an administration six weeks in I am agnostic) and have no dog in this particular fight. But usually I can at least see both sides of an argument. Here I just don’t understand it.