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Surprise! Liberal public policies are much more destructive to education and the poor than the mainstream media is willing to report. Author and Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather MacDonald made this discovery during her career as an investigative journalist, and her first-person observations became the basis for this eye-opening new book.
Central to this ideology is the notion that the poor should not be held responsible for their own behavior because they are victims of an unjust and racist society. Once that premise is accepted, MacDonald writes, the way is paved for "government to assume the role of parents." Double standards are established for minorities, education becomes a tool for "ethnic empowerment" rather than a means of gaining knowledge, and reason is dismissed as "a tool of male oppression." As a reporter for a major New York City newspaper, Ms. MacDonald interviewed a welfare mother who admitted that, if she were forced to do without food stamps, she would get a husband. When MacDonald attempted to include this enlightening bit of information in her story, she was instructed by her editor to take it out because the quote would "stigmatize the poor." "I learned that, if you want to know how well social policies are working, ask the poor - when their advocates aren't around," she writes. "There are no harsher critics of the welfare system than the people within it." MacDonald points out that journalists are not the only ones buying into such ideology, but that the "liberal elites," including university professors, government bureaucrats, judges, and others, go through all sorts of contortions in their attempts "to discover new ways in which the poor are incapable of behaving responsibly." The result is a separation between those living in long-term poverty and the solutions favored by the elites. The impact is especially tragic in education, where bad ideas originate in the teachers colleges and cause the problem that Johnny's teacher cannot teach as she wants to teach and as parents expect her to teach. MacDonald describes teacher education as being in the grip of a dogma that can be summed up in the slogan "Anything but Knowledge." Bad Ideas traces in fascinating detail the destruc-tive effects of these "tragic-comic" absurdities unleashed by faulty premises on American society, particulary the underclass. (Ivan R. Dee Publishers, Chicago, 2000; 234 pp., $26) |
Ms. MacDonald believes that bad ideas naturally have bad consequences. She writes that these bad ideas have proliferated since the 1960s, springing from an "inflexible ideology" among American intellectuals that "prevents them from seeing clearly the reality in front of their eyes, if it doesn't square with theory."
