And we are in the 21st century?
Michael Kundu, the Marysville School Board member who was under fire for writing what many charge is a racist e-mail, resigned Monday from the board.
…Kundu’s decision came after the NAACP, the Tulalip Tribes, the Hispanic Commission and four board members asked him to resign in the weeks following a June 3 e-mail in which Kundu suggested that different races have different brain sizes and intellectual capacities. Those racial differences, he implied, help explain the school district’s achievement gap.
“He crafted that e-mail, and he knew what he was doing,” Crenshaw said. “His resignation is the best thing for students.”
Did Kundu receive his education through the public system? If so, that explains everything.
That he is racist can be explained by the fact that he is a product of the public schools system? What a bitter and stupid thing to say. Someone has a grudge. Oh wait…did you go to public schools?
“Did Kundu receive his eduction through the public system? If so, that explains everything.”
Really?
That’s got to be just about the most insulting and condescending thing you’ve ever posted, Charles. And that’s saying a lot.
Don’t you think it’s much more likely he was was the product of home schooling or a private school that limited his contact with people who were different from himself? An education that never challenged his pathetic small-minded world view?
In other words, an education rather like your own.
Dr. Kundu later explained that tuberculosis is caused by too much “phlogiston” in the humours.
“Did Kundu receive his eduction through the public system? If so, that explains everything. “
From answers dot com:
E·duc·tion n. [L. eductio .] The act of drawing out or bringing into view. Eduction pipe , Eduction port
You mean “education”, right? Even people with Ph.Ds can make typos. This typo gives your comment a flavorful context.
I’m going to have to agree with #2. I wasn’t going to take that pot-shot at the end, but to suggest the public education system is this far out of whack while alternative education systems are not, is trouble to say the least.
I would suggest he was home-schooled.
Isn’t your own daughter currently in public schooling? Such faith in the future of your own progeny!
Public schooling in the US does seem to be a bit below par, from what I’ve seen. But that’s not to say I’ve any reason to think that private or home schooling here is any better.
recently i got a right wing chain email from my fam, ‘what are they teaching our children these days’ lamenting how a few randomly interviewed bimbos don’t know the Heritage of 4th of july. the horror.
public schools attacked from the left.. from the right…
@4, fixed. @1, i had tutors and finished high school in a private institution. my main criticism of public education in america is it’s chronically underfunded and is not the ultimate site of social investment, which it should be. in general, the public education system has trained americans not to take education very seriously.
@6, precisely. i’m going on about my daughter’s hair and not her fucking grades. that is an american public education in action.
It had nothing to do with public schools and everything to do with being in Marysville.
@10: High school graduation rates vs. public school graduation rates? Are high schools always private only? Are there no public high schools?
Moreover, is there a bias? I imagine families who pay 20K in tuition for private educations are probably much more likely to push for completion or for post-secondary studies because of the investment they’ve already made.
I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. The reason public schools fail is because Americans don’t take education seriously. The U.S. spends a reasonable amount (not the most) on education, but you can’t teach kids who don’t want to learn and whose parents don’t give a crap.
@10,
Private schools do so well because the kids want to learn or at least are held to high standards by their parents. Private school teachers are, by and large, paid less and have fewer qualifications than public school teachers.
@10 Have you seen the self-selected progeny of upper class wealth from stable families that can afford tutors and enrichment programs for their kids who fill the halls for the private schools versus the everybody else who can’t afford to send their rugrats to a private slum like O’Dea and have to settle for Seattle Public Schools?
That might explain some of the difference in test scores and graduation rates.
Women, in large part, have smaller brains than men. Would Mr. Kundu conclude that women different intellectual capacities? How does that explain that women generally score higher on tests than men.
Why am I debating myself.
Hey, uh, knee-jerking aside, is anything he said scientifically supported? If he’s just a “88888 wyte powah” asshole who somehow got onto the school board, by all means run him the fuck off. If, however, he’s saying something scientifically supported and yet socially unacceptable (I refer here specifically to the comments about brain mass, and make no correlations to actual intelligence), why is he being punished?
@16 and the chances of that are… what now? 😉
@ 16 – That issue has been explored, actually, and any studies finding a correlation between either brain mass and race or IQ (not to be confused with our colloquial use of the word “intelligence”) and race have been pretty much debunked.
You’d think Kundu would have known better after the whole Stephanie Grace thing this past spring. -_-
As a public schools parent, I find Charles’ remarks insulting.
This School Board member’s ideas are more likely to be a product of his upbringing than his schooling.
Maybe you should take your daughter out of SPS if you think public education is so lacking.
Kundu would find that a future in environmental sanitation engineering reveals that all garbage smells equally as rotten.
@19: As a public schools survivor, I don’t. I had to teach myself the rest of English (my mother tongue!) after high school ended. And when kids ran into trouble with math or grammar, there weren’t really mechanisms for individualized attention to make sure they understood the lessons. If they were “lucky”, they would simply be dropped down to remedial studies.
Not all public schools are the same, and few of them can be nationally exemplary institutions. It it were a cheese, the U.S. public education system would make Swiss look practically solid.
@18
Ahh, okay. So he’s just an ignorant, racist douchenozzle. Let’s be rid of him!
I’m not sure why people are so shocked or offended by Charles’ statement that this guy came from the public school system. Public education in America Is terrible. And it does certainly have the capacity to breed this kind of insensitivity and lack of capacity for critical thinking. You all shouldn’t be so suprised; I just finished four years of high school so I can speak to this with first hand knowledge.
Three words Charles… Bellevue Public Schools. You live within a few miles of one of the best public school districts in the country (Issaquah and Lake Washington are also excellent).
Sorry you’re so caught up in your little bubble of anger at what you perceive happened in your daughter’s classroom in Seattle to realize that your comment is an overly broad generalization and not accurate… not to mention insulting to the employees, board members and parents who have worked so hard to make their schools amongst the best in the country, and the students who have graduated and gone on to be very productive members of society.
Kindu is clearly an at the very least a misinformed dolt, or at the worst a racist. Somehow I don’t think either had anything to do with his K-12 education, public or otherwise.
I can’t imagine feeling compelled to ride to the defense of the lazy, power-tripping buffoons who were officially responsible for the better part of my state-sponsored education. It must be miserable to go through life with your ego anchored to something as pathetically unloved as American public schooling.
I think Charles is right actually. I am hardly an exception, but making unfounded generalizations about anything (e.g. racial myths, public education in the US, etc) doesn’t indicate breadth or depth in education or experience to me either.
Kandu is a product of an English education, like brother Charles.
George W. Bush is the product of a private education. President Obama is the proud product of public schools.
Charles point of the underfunding of our school system is valid, but doesn’t fit here. Specially if he tries to equate it with the ramblings of a man who beleives in aryan Brahman superiority.
The #1 predictor of student success is parental involvement in their education. A parent who chooses to pay thousands of dollars to send their child to private schools is literally more invested automatically than one who isn’t really sure what school their kid goes to, or whether they’re learning advanced physics or painting the walls with their own feces.
Blaming the “system” for educational failures is just living out the old adage about pointing a finger – four of them are still pointing back at you. Want public schools to improve? Get involved with them. Want your children to have a better education? Take an active hand in it.
Private schools don’t have to take kids who just got out of prison, kids with Down syndrome, kids with Tourette’s, high schoolers who are still subliterate, etc. Public schools don’t have that luxury. They have to figure out how to try to educate, or at least warehouse, all those various subclasses of kids, keep them from killing one another or the teachers, get them all to school, feed them, oh, and improve test scores every year. Think that should be simple? Well, start your own school then. But no cherry-picking – you have to take everyone.
@16 and 23
“different races have different brain sizes and intellectual capacities” TRUE
“(IQ) test scores show statistical differences, with the average score of the African American population being lower – and that of the Asian American population being higher – than that of the White American population”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_in…
The sad thing is, this is what passes for modern science in a Texan schoolbook.
A simple trip through the Google probably would have showed you that this idiot went to high school and college in Canada – Ontario, to be more precise. A little more research and you probably would have read about his undergraduate institution – Ryerson University – and its issues with racism, as well as Phillipe Rushton’s highly offensive research at the University of Western Ontario, which Kundu was citing.
But by all means, feel free to slam the U.S. public school system in general – it’s always great to have a scapegoat. After all, that’s why the GOP/Faux News has so much success at getting their messages across – blame someone else for the problem. (If it’s not the schools, then it must be the teachers, or the unions, or the illegals, or the liberals, or the Democrats, or the Muslims, or the blacks, or the Chinese, or the atheists….) Too bad – I expected a bit more from you.
30 – your reference to that hallowed source of academe, Wikipedia, doesn’t support that argument or a correlation, causality, etc. If I take the statement quoted as true, that still doesn’t mean this is a racial issue. There’s still a cultural lineage for Asians that has been starkly different for quite awhile. AND parents are far more involved in their children in some Asian cultures. Anecdotally, I am thinking about my Korean wife’s 15 hour/day high school education (over the top for sure) and her mother’s 1000 prostrations at the local Buddhist temple so that she could get a decent score on her college entrance examinations. Of course, it’s an anecdote, but there is an infrastructure in S. Korea (albeit corrupt) that’s a high pressure education machine. Some of that must rub off culturally.
@13 is most correct.
Also, his opinion on brain sizes is not the result of an eduction.
@32, my point was not to offer hard facts about kundu. he is nut, and that is that. my point is this: america goes on and on about democracy being the near-holy right to vote. but that is a weak concept of democracy. the right to vote is useless without the right to a decent education. because only certain citizens have access to decent schools, there is no real democracy in this country.
the system emphasizes voting (which is cheap) over providing the actual cultural materials that are needed to support a democracy.
i suppose it would make sense to a laymen that brain size is genetic and therefore race related…
public education is not really known for professing the mathematical roots of logic.
mudede: i am always surprised by how often you and i agree. who knew a marxist and an anarchist would find anything in common?
@ 35 mudede,
it seems to me that we concur on the source of the disease. our difference is in solution. i assume you might want to spill more public funding into education while i would advocate to cut it completely.
separation of education and state are synonymous to me to separation of church and state. both political and spiritual world views are personal. i think people should be free to choose.
anyhow. its a long story.