For one from whom we might expect careful thinking — after all he’s on the staff at Stanford University — Thomas Sowell continues with the silliness we’ve come to expect from him. His Jan. 27 column, “Random thoughts, from Obama to radical feminists,” states that public schools ” … exist to provide guaranteed jobs to members of the teachers’ unions.” That’s not only patently false, it’s a slap in the face of dedicated teachers who do their best to teach kids to read, write, deal with numbers, learn how to play a musical instrument, and how to get along with each other.
I spent 30 years in the classroom, plus seven working in a program for at-risk kids. I resent his statement.
Further, he has the audacity to say “from kindergarten to the universities (our educational system) is engaged in the mass production of fashionable humbug — propaganda rather than education.” From what I gather, propaganda is “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” I don’t know what Sowell sees at Stanford, but he’ll not see “propaganda rather than education” going on in our public schools. The real propaganda comes from his political cause. It’s hurtful, demoralizing, unsubstantiated and offensive.
Howard Meharg
Vancouver
