Opportunity

A response to Tomas Sowell, who declares that "I made it, everyone can make it"......

Your recent article concerning educational opportunity, both yours and the doctor's hit many of the essential elements of public education in America.

Note, I talk about public education, not the privatized nonsense that you otherwise promote all the time.

Yes, there is an element of luck to the educational system in the United States; too much reliance on luck, and not enough on equal opportunity. This is the luck of the lottery winner, the odds just keep getting smaller.

For centuries the United States has mouthed the American Dream "All Men are Created Equal" but have participated in systems of institutionalized racism.

The educational system is not an exception. Educational systems in the United States perpetuate what is becoming a "banana republic" system of opportunity.

Privilege leads to success, not necessarily luck. My Freshman year at Stanford, in 1965, saw me introduced to two characters who changed my outlook on achievement and opportunity forever.

One was Pancho Tremain. His father was CEO of United Press International, at the time the largest news network in the world. Pancho had grown up in Scarsdale New York, was a pure product of privilege. He hated Stanford, and conspired to drop out, in defiance of his father, who was an alum. And he accomplished his goal, skipping classes all year, having girls in our room all the time (I practically moved in with another dorm mate). It took him an entire year to drop out. Stanford desperately kept trying to keep him, no doubt because of the large contributions his father made.

This was a very different Stanford of today. Children of privilege were everywhere.

I was a part Cherokee Native American, on football scholarship, from Redding California, and attended a public school that was average for the time. So, when they taught Socrates in Western Civ., I had no idea what they were talking about, my Preppie friends had been introduced to greek philosophy when they were Freshman in Prep School.

I was lost, I floundered, I struggled. I finally caught up my Sophomore year, learned the code of learning, and flourished.

The other individual I met was Mitt Romney. Romney was a "top boy" in his Prep School. He was a likable person, funny, and very social. He also was involved in his father's fledgling presidential campaign; we talked politics all the time.

I have been a New Deal Democrat since I can't remember, Mitt of course was not. We argued about opportunity, government, and especially about the Vietnam War.

Mitt was an excellent and dedicated student. Pancho was not.

But they both shared a kind of cynicism relative to educational opportunity. They both took it for granted, that everyone could succeed, like their families, regardless of the circumstances. They both took it for granted that individual drive and initiative could overcome everything. They both were delusional.

I knew different. I had come from a much poorer environment, was one of the first members of my half-breed family to graduate from high school, and had seen many of my friends ratholed into lives they simply fell into, with little or no chance for anything else.

In those days that meant working in the woods, because Redding was a logging area. Often this also meant good pay and benefits.

That all ended in 1980, when clear cutting, and overseas milling of lumber won out, and the lumber industry crashed.

And my friends, unlike Mitt and Pancho, had no safety net, became under or not employed for the rest of their lives.

Look, opportunity is not all by chance. There are economic, political and social forces way bigger than an individual, and it sometimes takes more than a good mother to foster success.

And, thanks to the convoluted ideology, you spout constantly from your venue at the top of Hoover Tower, the United States now has the economic opportunity of Bolivia (or close).

There is a public trust, there is a social compact, that can work to afford a chance to everyone. Right now, that does not exist. In 1965 it did not exist either.

The tragedy is today compared to 1965, the chances are even slimmer.



Sent from my iPad