Nearly seven million people have watched this video on YouTube. It is inspirational in many ways, most powerfully for me in its haunting echos of those trapped below the decks of slave ships. The video radiates creativity and beauty of the music that emerged from the black slaves and their descendants in early America.
There is a specter from those days that haunts us once again: the increasing servitude and dependency being spun out of public schools that are mainly black and broadly inferior to schools for other kinds of kids. To great fanfare the Obama administration promises to spend billions of dollars making some failing schools better. But is that anything more than cleaning up the slave ships a bit? We will continue to have one kind of school that turns out minimally employable descendants of slaves and the other kind of school that turns out the competent class — unless fundamental educational reconfiguring takes place.
A way is now increasingly effective for jumping ship from the limitations of awful public schools. It is possible learn whatever these schools teach very easily online — and to learn online a very great deal more. And as posted here yesterday, online learning does not know if the hand clicking in is black, white, or even Neptune green.
