Our society is a carefully crafted and mostly artificial construct. Most of what we think we know is simply untrue. However, as long as everything is running smoothly most of us don’t notice. We are busy with daily life and distracted by limitless entertainment. When we do get significant disruptions to that construct, it sheds some light on things that are otherwise hidden from view. As a pertinent example, I present three news stories, one local, one from Chi-town and one from the Big Apple:
FWCS offering free meals during closure
Fort Wayne Community Schools will provide free meals for children while the district is closed for a month amid the coronavirus threat.
The district said Sunday it would offer free breakfast and lunch packs for children ages birth through high school, beginning Tuesday. Children do not have to attend a Fort Wayne Community school.
Even if you aren’t a student and even if you are an infant, Fort Wayne schools will provide “free” meals.
In Chicago, the mayor was trying to keep the schools open:
Will Chicago Public Schools stay open? Mayor Lori Lightfoot tells faith leaders she’s expecting Gov. J.B. Pritzker to take action.
As she has repeatedly done in recent days, Lightfoot noted the “significant secondary effect” of closing Chicago schools because working parents would need to find care for kids not in class and because many of the 355,000 CPS children count on the schools for multiple meals each day.
But now it appears that the schools in Chicago and across Illinois are closing starting tomorrow for several weeks (at least).
Meanwhile in New York, under enormous pressure, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced yesterday the closure of all NYC schools at least until April 20th and possibly for the year. Hizzoner was very reluctant to do so and it was looking like the teachers were just not going to show up on Monday so he relented, meaning the over ONE MILLION school children in New York City will be off school for a month. Why was the Mayor fighting so hard to keep the schools open? A different story from the New York Post, De Blasio admits NYC doesn’t have backup plan if public schools close, posted just hours before he changed his mind, gives us a clue….
“A variety of contingencies are being set up. They are far from perfect,” de Blasio said on CNN Sunday morning after a growing number of teachers, local elected officials and parents called for the closure.
“The difference between a functioning school system for over 1 million kids versus creating alternative centers for feeding or for the kids of health care workers, that kind of thing, if we got to that point we would improvise anything and everything,” de Blasio said.
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“My blunt fear is if the schools shut down they will be done for the year, done for the school year maybe even for the calendar year. So I’m very reticent to shut down schools,” de Blasio said.
Among his reasons for keeping schools open are the fact that poor kids who get their meals at schools, health care providers and first responders need a place to send their children, and unsupervised teens create health and safety concerns.
Yep.
When you cut through all of the nonsense and rhetorical flourishes when it comes to the public education system, the truth starts to really emerge:
Our public schools are basically really expensive and inefficient daycare centers.
More and more, schools serve as a place to feed poor kids, reinforcing bad behavior by removing more of the negative consequences of poor decision-making by feeding those kids and freeing up money so mama can get some new tattoos to lure the next baby-daddy. For middle and working class families, schools are a place for parents to dump their kids so mom and dad can both work.
In urban areas there is another dynamic and it is on display in the words in red above. Public schools with truancy laws and armed school security keep “teens” and “school children” confined during the day. New York City as a whole is about 33% white, 13% Asian, 23% black and 29% mestizo. I assume that the white and Asian population is skewed toward older age brackets so the school age population is even more “diverse”. According to Wikipedia:
In October 2018, the student population was 42% Hispanic and Latino, 26% African American, 15% Non-Hispanic White, and 16% Asian American. Another 3% were of multiple race categories. Of the students, 20% were disabled, 13% were English language learners, and 73% met the Department’s definition of poverty.
The “disabled” category is not just kids who are blind or in wheelchairs but also includes a significant number of kids that are just plain out of control and have Individual Education Plans (IEP) for behavior issues. These kids pretty much can’t be disciplined for any reason because they are “disabled”. When I was a kid, they were just trouble-makers and either got expelled or sent to the vocational school to get them away from the regular kids.
So with around 1.1 million kids, that means you have about three quarters of a million black and mestizo kids, many middle or high school aged, with nowhere to go and nothing to do on a Monday. Fortunately it looks like NYC is going to get a lot of rain this week so that might keep the school children from doing too much of this sort of thing:
OUTRAGE:this is sickening video of a 15 year old girl viciously attacked by a group of school children. One young man takes the sneakers right off the unconscious victim’s feet. The teenager is in the hospital recovering. We CAN NOT allow this behavior in our community. #Speakup pic.twitter.com/VLLb91fDOM— NYPDBrooklynNorth (@NYPDBklynNorth) March 6, 2020
I feel bad for the small store owners in some of these neighborhoods. It is about to get all Mad Max up in those ‘hoods.
In major urban centers from Detroit (83% black, 13% mestizo) to Chicago to NYC, and that list will certainly continue to expand, the holding pens we call public schools are closing up and the biggest concern is that:
A) Millions of kids in America depend on the public school system for at least two meals a day.
B) Hundreds of thousands of teens are going to be running wild for the next month as temperatures warm up.
I haven’t seen a single mention of these kids losing a month of education. That doesn’t seem to be the priority at all because these schools in urban areas are a combination central location for social services and proto-prisons complete with armed guards.
The Wuhan virus, COVID-19, coronavirus, whatever you call it, is exposing the farce of the public school system, especially in urban areas. They aren’t about education or socialization, they are places to warehouse kids, many who are dangerous or are so impoverished they rely on the school for breakfast and lunch.
Maybe there is a valid purpose for social stability in having massive institutions to provide for and control kids who clearly can’t be taken care of by their own parent(s). I would just ask that we be honest about what we are getting for our tax dollars.
Public schools, even here on tony Long Island, have been a sad, sick joke for as long as I can recall, which is why my wife and I made the decision to send our children to parochial schools. We could barely afford it, but it was the best and wisest investment we ever made.
I read somewhere recently that the vast majority of urban 'minority' children get most of their daily calories, for free, at "skoo". I'll bet that if you subtract off the East Asians, that 'vast majority' skews toward 'All'. When I was a boy, there were no more than a handful of kids in my elementary school, every last one of them black, who received free lunch. They were issued a token that clearly identified them as 'needy' and subjected them to incessant ridicule, mainly from other blacks. Even in that benighted community it was a source of shame to be seen taking handouts.
No longer, obviously. Today its a competition to see who can guilt and milk YT the hardest. There is no shame whatsoever associated with taking something for nothing. How many minority famblies do you suppose have prepped for the coming months with the "keeds" out of school and that expensive, inefficient daycare closed down? Now that they are free to burgle up to $950 worth of "free shit" without fear of felony charges, its going to be lights out in every retail store in every 'hood. At which point they will be commuting into our neighborhoods, seeking reparations. Bet on it.
TBC
Poverty was once something people desired to escape from, to rise above. My dad's family was very poor but he worked hard, put himself through medical school and built something pretty nice. Today? Poverty now is something to be embraced and exploited. Figuring out how to game the system instead of figuring out how to stop being dependent on the system.