The new social-Darwinism
Charter schools for those with "highest potential"
Robert Schwartz's post today on Huffington, "Why Charters and College Access Programs Should Cream," is but the latest incarnation of Social-Darwinism applied to current public education policy. Such theories were popular in the late Victorian era in England, America, and elsewhere.
The basic notion was--and still is--that the strongest or fittest should survive and flourish in society, while the rest --- not. The theory was chiefly expounded by Herbert Spencer, whose ethical philosophies were grounded in an elitist worldview and received a boost from the application of Darwinian ideas such as adaptation and natural selection. In its most extreme form, Social-Darwinism was used to justify eugenics programs aimed at weeding "undesirable" genes from the population. While we usually associate such theories with Nazi Germany, we have always had our home-grown versions within U.S. academia and politics.
President Obama, while on the campaign trail in 2007, was a vocal critic of Social-Darwinism as practiced by the