I’ve always admired Diane Abbott, one of the most left-wing British MPs, though admittedly only for one thing. Many years ago she campaigned against private schools. As a good socialist this comes as part of the ideological package, and Abbott was more than happy to join in the class war against parents who are in a position to educate their children outside the state system.
However, as some readers might remember, when it came to her own school choice Ms. Abbott looked around the local state schools and decided that none of them was good enough for her own progeny. So she sent her son to the City of London School, a private school for boys. Confronted with this hypocrisy, Abbott did the sole thing that I admire her for. She admitted that the double-standard she had been caught in was indeed “indefensible.” She was a hypocrite. She admitted it and moved on.
It is rare that someone caught in a charge of hypocrisy throws their hands in the air and says, “Yes, I’m a hypocrite.” It reminded me of the old truism that if the men in white coats come along to section you for insanity your worst line of defense is to say, “You’ve got the wrong person. I’m not mad.” Much rarer but more honest is the person who says, “Gosh I’m glad you’ve finally caught up with me. I’ve been a lunatic for years.” My point is that there is something refreshing about honesty. Especially when it is embarrassing.
Which brings me to the matter of Nikole Hannah-Jones. Some readers might be fortunate enough never to have heard of her but Hannah-Jones made her name some years ago with the “1619 Project.” This was an attempt – backed by the New York Times – to reframe the American national story.
It started from the premise that the United States began when the first slaves were transported across the North Atlantic. The aim of Hannah-Jones’s project was to claim that absolutely everything in American history was the result of slavery and white supremacy and that everything in the American national story – including emancipation – should be viewed through this remorselessly negative light.
Among the claims of the 1619 project was that capitalism is white supremacist because people who ran slave plantations used bookkeeping and numbers. Thus any American worker sitting in front of a spreadsheet in the 2020s is unwittingly perpetuating a system founded in slavery. Of course they are also perpetuating a system that goes back to Ancient Mesopotamia, but let us, like Hannah-Jones, not let facts detain us.
In her crusade to stop whiteness Hannah-Jones chose to use her daughter as a cultural battering-ram
During the American cultural revolution of the past decade Hannah-Jones was a fixture. She was retained by the NYT on a six-figure salary, though her workload does not seem to have been especially onerous.
Yet this week Hannah-Jones broke her silence and wrote something honest. Specifically she wrote an essay about the choice she had made to educate her daughter. Ten years ago she had written about how she was determined to educate her in the American state school system and accused that system – like everything else in America – of “perpetuating whiteness.” In her crusade to stop whiteness Hannah-Jones chose to use her daughter as a sort of cultural battering-ram.
The results were obvious. In her essay Hannah-Jones listed the problems in her daughter’s school. When she visited at lunchtime she discovered a sort of lawless war zone. Children were going without lunch because it had not been provided for them. They were fighting, and there was no adult supervision. So after the best part of a decade Hannah-Jones decided to actually bother to look at what her daughter was being taught. One of her daughter’s favorite subjects was math, apparently. But on looking at her school work, she realized her daughter’s work was not just wrong but was unmarked. Teachers at the school favored the method that Hannah-Jones and other activists have favored of seeing grades as yet another example of white supremacy, so her daughter appeared to be effectively innumerate. She liked math and thought she was good at it because the teachers did not differentiate between right and wrong answers. This is like me claiming to be a 100m sprint record-holder because time is a racial concept.
In any case, Hannah-Jones’s daughter seems to have had enough of her catastrophic miseducation and asked her mother if she could move schools.
At this point there are a number of things that socialist activists do. They say – like the teaching unions – that more money must be poured into schools. They say that education is a question of funding and class size. Of course it is no such thing. America leads the world in the expense it goes to in order to make its young illiterate and innumerate. The school Hannah-Jones’s daughter went to is an exemplar. Teachers at the school earn an average of over $100,000 a year. The student-to-teacher ratio is nine to one and the spend per pupil is $52,000 per year per student.
I just checked how much it costs to send a pupil to the City of London School. Current termly costs are a little under £10,000, meaning that a year at one of the UK’s most exclusive fee-paying schools is just short of £30K a year. Which comes out at around $40K in US dollars. In other words, every student at Hannah-Jones Jr.’s failing taxpayer-funded New York school could be educated by the teachers at City of London, receive a world-class education and have $12K in spare change at the end of each school year.
I admire Hannah-Jones for admitting that the system she advocated and sacrificed her child into does not work. But I wish she and her fellow activists would ask the follow-on questions. If education is not in fact a matter of limited resources, what factors does a good education rely on? And might it include some of the disciplines and virtues which people like Hannah-Jones have spent their own well-remunerated careers waging a relentless war against?
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