A CHILD LEFT BEHIND

I’m speaking of myself, though in the past tense. Yes, in elementary school I was fat, consequently not very fast, and in kid games and running races, I was often a child left behind. This bothered me, but, of course, no one else repined.

Inside the school, on the other hand, the tables were turned, and I could think circles around those that ran circles around me. No one paid much attention to that, either; just as some could run faster, others could think faster – there were individual differences.

People would have laughed at the idea of spending extra school budget to teach me to run faster, just as they would have at the notion of trying to improve slow thinking via extra expenditure. (Incidentally, in those days there WERE children left behind in the contemporary connotation of the phrase; they failed grades and to go through them again.)

Some things don’t change in time; today, my natural lack of velocity would attract neither attention nor investment. When it comes to groups, however, there is COSMIC concern over inferior academic performance. That’s all today’s program, No Child Left Behind, is, a massive money throw-away to be damned sure that everyone in any of 40-odd groups, defined according to race, nationality, who knows what-all, perhaps blood type, gets money, money, and more money spent on him or her to guarantee factitious sense of equality.

Wouldn’t it be helpful and economical to quit playing Let’s Pretend? No one doubts, by massive evidence of observation, that, on average, African types run faster and jump higher than whites; it seems to be a natural difference. At the same time, no sane observer would dispute, on the massive evidence of observation, that whites, on average, outperform African types intellectually. If standardized tests aren’t enough for you, just look around – not at the fantasy world Horrywood seeks to fabricate, but as to whom is doing what and how well in the 3-D world you experience.

I’m not in the least humiliated that the average African of my age and sex can outrun and outjump me, nor that the result applies across the general population, so why should any African in my category feel disgraced that I can outthink him? They are natural differences, SO STOP BANKRUPTING US IN CHASING YOUR UNREALIZABLE PIPE DREAMS!!!!!