Tried With Fire

I've begun reading about the closing of Prince Edward County schools from 1959-1964. It's been eye-opening to say the least, given my ignorance about America's civil rights history. It's also a window into the blindness of the sin of racism. But this story is also about the power of education and the power to withhold it. Education can be used as a means of advancement and a weapon against ignorance, but what happens when it is deliberately withheld? Is this a form of oppression? When I read Karen Swallow Prior's bio of the English reformer, Hannah More, she fought for the education of the poor, but it was limited. They were only taught to read, not write. Boundaries of class needed to be preserved. Withholding or even giving a limited education achieved that end. Fast forward to 1950's Virginia. In 1951, black high school students in Farmville went on strike to protest the terrible conditions of their schools. The Commonwealth was already ranked 45 out ...

When I read Hidden Figures , it was eye-opening in more ways than one. In addition to the story of the three main characters, I received a brief lesson in civil rights history. During World War II, Virginia was in the bottom 25% of teacher's salaries. Black teachers earned half that amount. 1  Even though Supreme Court ruled in 1936 against racial discrimination in graduate admissions, the Commonwealth still found a way to maintain segregation. A voucher program was created to subsidize graduate tuition for black students in any state  but  Virginia. This program was in place until 1950. 2  These facts were asides within the larger narrative, but they still shocked me. As a child of immigrants, I know the value and power of education. It enabled my family to make a fresh start in a foreign land that is now our home. I've never been denied access to education because of my ethnicity or gender. But I've been sheltered in that regard. There are places in the wo...

I was going to write a review of  Hidden Figures but it's hard writing a review when you only have an audio version. Even though I listened to it twice, I can't go back to a particular page, but I can share what I remember and the thoughts and questions it has raised. Hidden Figures tells the story of the African American female mathematicians who helped the US win the space race and provided the math know-how for aircraft design during WWII. These women worked as human computers - solving advanced mathematical calculations with only their brains, data tables, and rudimentary calculators before the advent of the modern computers that we know today. One of these women was Dorothy Vaughan . Dorothy was a wife, mother, and public school teacher in Farmville, Virginia. She declined the opportunity to pursue a graduate degree in mathematics to become a teacher, one of the few professions open to black female college graduates. At that time, Virginia was in the bottom 25% for U...

I would have thought that something as black and white as math would be exempt from the spreading ooze of postmodernism. Obviously not: Today, however, most philosophers no longer even regard mathematics as a body of truths. The dominant philosophy of mathematics treats it as a social construction, like the game of baseball. "Three strikes and you're out" is an arbitrary rule. It's not true or false; it's just the way we choose to play the game. By the same token, mathematical rules are regarded as just the way we play the game. Even American schoolchildren are now taught this postmodern view of math. A popular middle school curriculum says students should learn that "mathematics is man-made, that it is arbitrary, and good solutions are arrived at by consensus among those who are considered expert." Man-made? Arbitrary? Clearly, our public schools have waded deeply into the muddy waves of postmodernism. Moreover, if math is arbitrary, then there ar...

When one considers what the public schools of America in many places already are--their materialism, their discouragement of any sustained intellectual effort, their encouragement of the dangerous pseudoscientific fads of experimental psychology--one can only be appalled by the thought of a commonwealth in which there is no escape from such a soul-killing system. But the principle of such laws and their ultimate tendency are far worse than the immediate results.  A public school system, in itself, is indeed of enormous benefit to the race. But it is of benefit only if it is kept healthy at every moment by the absolutely free possibility of the competition of private schools. A public school system, if it means the providing of free education for those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was c...