Never Forget That These Editorials Are The Opinion Of One Man
___- And tie May Be Wrong
To Be Expected
It is to be expected that public school
people — some but not all of them
will attack this writer, especially now
.that he has entered politics, as an enemy
of public schools simply because we
have repeatedly stated 'that the public
schools are NOT as good as they should
be with the money lavished upon them
by the taxpayers.
This kind of reflex action from some
segments of the public school apparatus
accents the kind of logic that begins
with the premise that every thing that
is wrong with the public schools can
be corrected with more and more money.
Quantity and quality have very little
in common, but it is possible to have
both quantity education for the 13,000
students in the Lenoir County school sys
tems and still have quality education
without monstrous increases in the mon
ey provided.
There is too much deadwood clutter
ing up the job of the real workers in
education: The classroom teacher. This
poor, underpaid soul is surrounded by
a sea of administrators — each and all
being paid more than the worker across
the desk from the student. --—
Classroom teachers in the public schools
are weighted down with all too many
jobs, and endless forms to complete
that have very little real meaning to
the student and to the quality of teach
ing offered, but do have a great deal
to do — in fact everything to do —
with keeping these non-teaching types
busy with their little nitpicking projects.
It is this writer’s further conviction
after many years of close study that the
taxpayers of Lemur County have been
systematically robbed of millions of dol
lars by the inequitable distribution prac
it.. hoard. . *
the state school board not only rwould
the taxpayers of the county fare a great
deal better, but so would the people
working in the school systems. These are
the ends to which we aim all of our ef
forts for improving the public schools
of Lenoir County.
In Saturday Review?
Among American publications “Satur
day Review” is as far to the left as
one can go and still associate with the
clean fingernail set, and it has been
one of the loudest and longest thump
ers of the education stump for total ra
cial integration, but it, too, is learning
as evidence in the March 21 issue in tan
article toy Henry M. Levin, associate
professor of education at Stanford Uni
versity, titled “Why Ghetto Schools Fail.”
The Levin article does not abandon
integration in principle; only in practice,
as it sketches a possible answer to some
of those many problems that have caus
ed ghetto schools to fail, and this in
cludes recognition of one fundamental
weakness of such schools: That they do
not have to compete- That they operate
with a captive clientele, and he^sug
gests that acceptance of a system which
rewards success and penalizes failure
may now lately toe in order.
Among suclfplans is one called “The
Market Plan,” which is the suggestion
of Professor Milton Friedman from the
University of Chicago, who believes by
“giving students and their parents a
choice of sdhooflg, and toy requiring
schools to compete for students, sub
stantial increases in education effective
ness would result. For^ifscbools had
to compete for students in order to
survive, they would likely toe much more
responsive, tc
their
Levin
such an
Skyscrape:
land, a bank
archists destroyed
toys in a swank New
and along a Maryland roadside; tius is
guerilla war, and it is total war and the
sooner our nation*! and state leadership
understand this the. better off our na
tion will be.
It is open war planned and subsidiz
ed by international communism with
money flowing into our country to un
derwrite this treason through every Rus
sian, Cuban and Soviet satellite diplo
matic mission. ^
The people who paid the bills for
the riots at the Democratic Convention
in Chicago, who paid fen* the March on
The Pentagon, who hired Lee Harvey
Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, Earl Ray and
who underwrite the “Chicago Eight” and
the ragtail assortment of black mili
tants are all the same sorry crew.
Yet our government still sits limply
by and permits boatloads of young Am
erican traitors to go to Cuba to “help
harvest sugar cane” when their real
purpose is to study guerilla war and to
bring back money and plots to destroy
the nation that has been too kind to
them. 1
Black militants through their ignorance
and violence are hanging the extremely
heavy sword of ultimate backlash over
the heads of all colored people in our
nation, because in a time of frustration
and explosion no one will have the poWer
to separate the black sheep from the
black militants.
No one will be able to persuade the
angry mobs to recognize the fact that
the vast majority of American Negroes
are not involved in this attack on the
country they love as much as any white
citizen. No one will be able to scream
loudly enough over the roar of the
mob that this is a plot hatched by white
men in Moscow, Pekin and Havana.
Let a few more skyscrapers and court
houses and banks be dynamited and ev
ery young Negro with a bushy hairdo
and dark glasses will be in direct and
immediate danger of losing hiis life
most violently- Before that day arrives
— and it will arrive unless immediate
steps are taken — our government had
better step into the breech and bring
this terrorism under control and by
whatever steps may be necessary for
this
total war, make no mis
state providing tuition vouchers to par
ents for a specified maximum sum per
year for each child. Parents would be
free to use these vouchers at any ap
proved institution of their choice. In
stitutions would be encourage to enter
the marketplace lip compete for stu
dents, and any school that met minimal
requirements in suck vreas as curricul
um and personnel would be eligible
to participate. Thus, a system of nob
public schools would compete with the
pQBlic schools for students.”—
He concludes, \ “Only those public
schools that would be responsive to the
needs of their students could survive
such competition; so a healthy infusion
of nonpublic schools into the market
would also tend to keep the remaining
public schools on their toes. '
Socialists learn, too; only more slow
ly, and never quite so weH. J '
Commonplace among current phenom
eon tsthe “Expert-Out-of-Field,” best
epitomized by The Pope, an eternally
foresworn bachelor, who pontificates
from his high seat as the world’s most
eminent authority on birth control. Here
in North Carolina Marse Grant, who is
a member of the Baptist Curia, and edi
tor of its “Bibical Recorder,” has sud
denly become the state’s most expert
witness on liquor-by the drink; despite
the fact that he neithers dips, drinks,,
nor chews.
Having had my earlier exposure to
the less harsh Episcopal principles of
temperance, rather than the Baptist
dogma of total abstinence I had some
how reached the age of 52 not know
ing there was any other way to use li
quor than by the drink. Apparently,
.however, Msg. Marse has come upon
some other method that has not been
clearly defined at this time. Perhaps
some of the “pot” set is soaking their
“weed” in booze and inhaling it. The
“horse” mainHners may be hypoing vod
ka into their system and some of the
“effete” may'be using their favorite
booze hind-part-before to avoid the dan
gers of whisky breath, and the highway
patrol’s breatholyzer.
‘_i_'
Closer to home I have become an
“Expert-Out-of-Field” on education, de
spite the fact that I have yet to com
plete my doctoral thesis- This has caus
ed some experts-in-the-field to assume
that I know no more about education
than The Pope knows about birth control
and Msg. Marse knows about a hangover.
And they may be right, but I can count
fairly well although I make no Einstein
ian pretenses as to my mathematical abil
ity.
But the unkindest cut of all has come
from a few unlettered souls who pre
sume that I have in mind the destruc
tion of the public schools because I am
on the board of trustees of a private
school. This is to presume that I am
both cruel and stupid, and I assure
who have gotten this far that neither is
true. \I am in favor of better public
schools, and there is no sure way to as
sure better schools than to give them
some competition.
No one I’ve talked with assumes that
private schools now or at any time in
the foreseeable future will replace pub-x
lie schools. This is so improbable as
to border the impossible. But I am
candidly one voice in the educational
wilderness who does not believe that
quantity and quality are synonyms, al
though I fully realize that big schools
can be good schools, and it is far easier ~
to have a good .school with adequate
funds than on a financial shoestring.
I also totally subscribe to the certain
knowledge, supported by every unbiased
study, that colored students learn more
in colored schools under colored teach
ers, and that thfe same follows with white
students. And this is not a racist view.
-To the contrary it IS racist to say that
a Negro cannot learn except tucked