diversity rewritten as a Letter to Obama, 2/4/2013

Van A. Huebner from post at Teachers' Letters to Obama

Why is diversity such a difficult state to maintain much less define?...

I recently made an appeal for diversity as a state to maintain in a nation... a diversity of histories, beliefs, and including educational curriculum and methods, and such. It occurs to me there is a slight problem with that. That inevitably there confrontations with what some will define as "evil". Two cases in point would be neo-nazism within a presumed democratic society and then the horrendous mistreatment of women in some cultures where it has been the norm. Can we in fact live peacefully with these facts. Could it be that certain cultural developments in fact exist to deny diversity or opportunity and therefore must be forcibly dealt with in order to preserve the continuity of diversity and opportunity for all. But wait, what does opportunity have do with diversity?

     Indeed if beliefs and conditions were the same for everyone perhaps we might find it difficult to define or even recognize opportunity... or worse opportunity would only seem like the dissolution of stability. Therein I believe is the crux of the problem for extremist groups such as racists and misogynists. Diversity and opportunity threaten their already weakened sense of stability, threaten to deny them their self-preserving absolutist beliefs.

     The test it would seem then is to ask how much dialogue will it take to persuade these groups that their own belief is their only true undoing, before the rest of the "free" world feels obliged to, as I said, intervene. Don't we jeopardize our claim to democracy when we intervene in other nations to fight such extremisms and inhumane events, or does this require a provision? How many of "us" will it require to justify such "police actions"? What is the critical mass for such exceptions to our general rule of freedom? 55%, 75%, 99% ? 

     And speaking of allowing for diversity, as a side note I mean, this very problem is exposed in the Supreme Court's 2002 (no. 02-241) oral argument Grutter v. Bollinger, wherein the problem of maintaining a proper diversity of students butts up against the individual rights of given excluded students through a "cloud[y]" (Justice Scalia) definition of what is a proper ratio for accepting applicants without it becoming a quota and therefore racial discrimination.

     So I guess the question I beg here is just how much commoness do we aspire to, and when does it become coercive, unjust and contrary to the individual pursuits of our children and the unique talents of our teachers.  Or perhaps I am asking isn't common core just a disguise for simply trying to increase the numbers of graduates without any real concern for what the students are gaining from their education. Does common core promote at all a diversity of thinking and ideas?

     Standards promote token numbers not real excellence or innovation.  As Justice Scalia puts it, we're "into quota land!"  (The above "cloud" reference BTW was from Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin wherein he off-handedly (?) suggests the use of cloud to supplant the use of "critical mass"; and "quotaland" is from Grutter...)

     ...so, are we merely stigmatizing, marginalizing individual excellence for the sake of the appearance that all is well and fair for the previously marginalized in American education. Does flattening the curve by reducing the depth of education help anybody excel, or merely feel at one with the rest of mediocrity?  Is common core the socioeconomic factor designed to make Affirmative Action unnecessary? If so it does all a disservice.

     But more importantly, shackling primary school teachers will not at all advance opportunities for enrollment in college later on. So in the mean time, until we do address shallow primary education, the aspirations for and definitions of "diversity" and opportunity will continue to pose an ethical, much less a constitutional problem.