While Ms. Tales in her article of November 17 has very cogently reported on the H.R.C.’s last public hearing on school violence precipitated by the events which rocked South Philadelphia High School in 12/09, the point of view of the teachers who experienced it directly and collaterally is strikingly absent. So is the history, despite those who, like myself, have experienced it first-hand years before. As I wrote in a letter which published on July 10, 2009, such behavior is wrong regardless of both intention and circumstance. Downplaying its history and propagation tacitly accommodates the perpetrators and mars the experience of those children who responsibly strive to succeed. Such is the philosophy of moral relativism and is harbored by school district officials and comforted by the S.R.C. and by Dr. Arlene Ackerman especially. Its primacy centers on “moving schools forward” to the detriment of properly addressing and redressing the aberrations in the past by those which it arguably affects most.
I can’t help but wonder what urban public education would sound like were the silences of reason and fair play not given short shrift by the abomination of political correctness and the derelictions of undue accommodation and tolerance. Happily, the latter are not my heritage as scholar and teacher. Sadly, such is what the umbral taint of Philadelphia’s progressives hath wrought as they ever have and likely ever shall.