Cracking the School-to-Prison Pipeline
By Anthony Asadullah SamadThere has been another raging discussion taking place over the past couple months, that of the school-to-prison pipeline. How many different ways can we say that the absence of investment in America's intellectual capital causes - even promotes - devastating social consequences? And how many different ways can we assess the racial consequences of misapplied forms of social control? No, there are no more "whites only" or "colored only" signs, which causes society to suggest that we are a more racially homogenous society. Yes, we do come together on some levels today. But the most common way in which we come together is on anti-intellectual levels.
If it's dumb, stupid, ill-informed, not well thought out in the 21st Century, it's most likely to be American. America's divestiture of its public education system, in the late 20th Century, is beginning to pay extremely negative dividends in the 21st Century. Mostly in that we have people speaking for us that don't have a clue, much less the capacity to find a clue. We see it every day, all around us. We have anti-intellectual (so-called) leaders. We even had an anti-intellectual President. Marginalized education and irreverent attitudes toward learning are the primary causes of mass anti-intellectualism. We can't it escape now. Neither can we escape the industrialization of mass incarceration that has seen the