"I Have A Dream!" and This Ain't It

The struggle of Humanity for social justice is far too often expressed as a litany of unapologetic platitudes. There is a degrading transformation of an ideal into a disposable sentiment that reduces holidays such as today into little more than another excuse to waste away our lives in the opiates of mass media, gaming, and vacant social networking.


Today, more than any other day, should expose the schemes to close the so-called educaton gap for what they are, an evil social engineering experiment run amok.

Today, Bush's NCLB scheme is called Race to the Top and it is wrapped in the Orwellian language that has plagued education for decades. If we have the courage to talk about these policies in plain english then we could expose their hidden agendas.

The Race to the Top in plain English is a government policy that intends to create the illusion of social equality and justice by providing a test score metric showing that all school children have approximately identical scores in English and math.

The schools will do this so that poverty and housing discrimination can remain intact because we aren't looking to solve inequality, poverty, adequate housing, job training, urban violence, black market drugs or the victimization of the poor to loan sharking. No, equality will be demonstrated in school test scores. And these scores will be used as a tool to establish social classes such as those found in India and China.

Social classes will have all of the corrosive and toxic benefits of racism without any of the fuss people like Martin Luther King would rail against.

There are those who say that Race to the Top is an inappropriate label for this education policy but it is precise in far more ways than educators imagine.

Maintaining racial segregation is at the "Top" of the priority list. The plan is to keep the urban environments warehouses for the poor and underclass citizens. Let them shoot each other, disease each other, and poison each other with social dysfunction. To have a Top is to celebrate a bottom and there is no plan to change where that bottom is.

And to Race to the Top is to Race up a social class hierarchy that excludes the undesirables. The tools of the race are weighed grades, segregation, and a social appetite for permanent poverty.

Martin Luther King's Dream was buried with him. What remains is a social fabric that self-insulates and distances itself from dreams that aren't consumer dreams and bumper sticker intellectualism.