2009 James Bauhaus

SHORT CUT SCHOOL

12-23-08: 1 just saw one of those feel-good stories on PBS. You know the kind. Some Caucasian organization gives free money to help out those poor minorities that we feel so guilty about. This one was on the Lehrer News Hour. I didn't get to catch all of it because of all these inmates chasing their ping-pong balls and shrieking with glee periodically, but the gist seemed to be this:

A young Negro submitted a plan to try and alleviate some of the hardcore underachieving minority children in a crowded city, probably New York. His bright idea is similar to one I proposed years ago and is still buried in my posted writings somewhere, but his plan involves paying students money to learn instead of dope. In this way his plan is probably more effective than mine, since minority teenagers have an easier time obtaining dope than money. His plan appeared to be well thought out, plus it had the perfect objective of saving "at-risk" children. A corporate- or foundation-funds administrator threw out a grant and the "school", called "Year-up!" was off to the rat races!

I say Year-up! is a "school" because it doesn't teach regular school stuff like math or science. Oh no! These subjects are too hard and not really relevant to Year-up!'s objective of making dead-end kids rapidly employable in today's sales-office type business environment that dominates the inner city. Year-up!'s abbreviated curricula is much more to the point and far more efficient than this. The first thing they do is select the most ingratiating few from a sea of teenagers wishing to be paid about $50/week to go to short-cut school that ends with an 87% chance of a $15/hour job. Being superior in the art of ingratiation is a big head start in this school, but further refining is always necessary. These kids have to be convinced that, no matter how amusingly proficient they are at making up their own language of slang and music-sounding noises, no one outside their tender years wants to hear it. Additionally, when too much Ebonic-oid creativity is allowed to build up, it becomes nonsense and gibberish, preventing the acquisition of proper English or efficient communication. Since English is the language on the paycheck, only the most stubborn refuse to see this connection between conformity and affluence. Such students are swiftly weeded out and returned to their respective ghettos with only a grudge to show for their determination to remain at the bottom of society.

Merely accepting and learning English is not enough. The culture of poverty and jealousy has several other traits that must be addressed. To the incentive of money is added the disincentive of "points". Over the course of running his school, the administrator has discovered that his students have very little concept of, or care about, the crucial nature of arriving on time at work. (The related problem of arriving ready to work is not addressed in this presentation, but undoubtedly occurs.) Points are subtracted for lateness. Eventually lateness is cured or the individual is excused from the program entirely, forfeiting the week's stipend. (My own experience with minority employment, which is extensive, suggests that a more effective incentive plan is one in which the payoff is larger and set further back in time, requiring a larger investment in effort. This winnows out persons who have a very short sense of the future. Also, the more common and creative their use of excuses for failure, the less likely they can complete the program.) Lastly, Year-up!'s students are taught to shake hands in the old-fashioned, Caucasian manner, to look potential employers and others in the eye, and to smile.

This news-presentation featured a compliant, articulate graduate, the usual comely young female, who digressed about her doubts of the utility of speaking dictionary English, and, oddly, the exhortation to smile. (One would think that everyone, especially women, learns the effectiveness of smiling prior to teenage years.) She at first saw nothing wrong with words like "ain't", "Huh?", "Nuh-uh" and "Whaddup?", which reveal incompetence in the speaker. The grant-holder listed the few specifics mentioned above and an 83% retention rate. Overall, the few, scant minutes allotted to Year-up! were relatively information-packed and attention-worthy. It is certain to attract further sponsorship despite the drawbacks that were not mentioned or are yet to surface.

The obvious drawback to shortcut "school" is that behind the smile and the passable communications skill there still lies illiteracy and incompetence. Year-up! sounds nice and effective in its presentation, but is the equivalent of cheating on a test. Corporations get tired of paying double wages for other corporations to supply them with grunts to work bulk, temporary jobs. Shortcut school sounds great as an alternative. The corporations pool their money with govt money in a tax-deductable, PR-rich endeavor to supply them with cheaper labor. They provide shortcut school with the answers to their short-term, low-level employment equation. Shortcut school devises a test that uses these answers as their curricula. Next thing you know, the office bullpen is full of smiling, handshaking, look-you-in-the-eye youngsters who are ready to get down to business! They are no longer too sullen to be taught how to use a copier. They are no longer too much of an embarrassment to let interact with clients. They will often take out the trash and perform other mundane tasks for months before becoming dissatisfied, disillusioned and disrespecting. There is just so much pride and respect to be garnered in a temporary, dead end job. Fortunately for the corporations, their Human Resources department managers are well-schooled in detecting this tipping point before it turns into too much vandalism and thievery. The problem employees are easily spotted and traded for new, no-experience-required, employees.

Persons who have worked their way through real schools will not relish depending upon or supervising persons who are the product of shortcut schools. Real work requires an extensive knowledge base that shortcut schools simply can not provide. Everyone loses as the skills of legitimate workers are forced to take up slack from the shortcut schooled workers, casting coworkers into the role of babysitter. Much more efficient is the mandatory schooling from which minority children were allowed to escape. The nondisciplinary regime that US schools were forced to adopt has caused three generations of ever-worsening incompetence and illiteracy. Removing corporal punishment and substituting expulsion has been the same as rewarding recalcitrance. Now we have succeeded in creating a class dependent upon handouts for subsistence, and guile and trickery for luxury. This is easily seen in my many essays detailing minority cultures. The swift are only superficially uplifting the impoverished by shorting them on school. These methods create an ever-increasing pool of persons demanding more and more help. As the burden grows, the swift slow. Gradually progress grinds to a halt. Rewarding incompetence, helplessness and lack of ambition or industry handicaps everyone. In the final analysis, the minority community is yet again teaching the establishment to accept less than that of which it is capable. In the next few, short decades we will discover just how important it was to build our educative human resources from the bottom up rather than from the middle to a low height. Today is December 25th. It should be bitterly cold, but it is like spring. In another 40 years we will desperately need thoudsands more scientists and engineers. What we will have instead is an army of starving, diseased, morons destroying the very things we create to prevent our species from going extinct. This, courtesy of our numbskull, sellout politicians and their short-sighted corporate masters.