Inner-City Carnage

I just had this one published at The American Thinker which you can find here or you can just keep reading...

In the course of my management consulting, I’ve been to some of the toughest neighborhoods in the country.

If you do business in these areas, you know to always visit them relatively early in the morning, before the animals wake up. Thus in my travels I’d see four and five-year old kids playing like all four and five-year olds do.

But, as they got older, they developed an increasingly hard look in their eyes. And, by only nine or 10, many had a look in their eyes no child in America should have.

Even at that age, they had put up with more crap than one can imagine. The neighborhoods they were born into have astonishing crime rates. The few terrorize the many and unlike the police, they don’t leave.

A great deal of America’s $500 billion annual illicit drug trade flows through their world. An illegal trade where violence and fear take the place of contracts and the rule of law.  An illegal trade which unfortunately often offers the best economic opportunity for many.

Job opportunities are limited and youth unemployment reaches heights unheard of anywhere else in the country. A hand up is not an easy thing to find in these neighborhoods.

In many of these places, a culture has taken root where the very keys to success are viewed as being somehow foreign and something to reject, not embrace. These realities are true regardless of one’s heritage but it has fallen disproportionally on black Americans.

What of the education opportunities presented to these children today? The inner-city schools these children are forced to attend are a national disgrace. Education has been called THE civil rights issue of our time by political leaders across the political spectrum.

What we see in the inner-cities is the result of a lot of factors. But a major one is the collapse of the educational system decades ago resulting in generations of people, each receiving a lousy education. Generations of people pretty much screwed from the womb with their only hope being a chance for a decent education.  Without that they are lost.  Without that they have little hope.  In the face of this desperate need, the schools that are forced upon these children are an obscenity.

It is quite easy for someone who has never witnessed these realities to talk about hard work and pulling one’s self up by the boot straps.  It is much easier said than done.  What future truly awaits a 12 year old with very poor reading and writing skills, little to no math skills, and no command of the English language?  They are supposed to happily go to jobs pushing a broom or flipping burgers?  And fighting for these jobs against an army of illegal immigrants who are willing to work for below-market wages?  Or is a much more logical path one of crime?  Far too many of these inner-city schools are simply one stop on the assembly line from school to prison or the cemetery.

It is a fact that blacks commit an astonishingly high percentage of all crimes, especially when you consider their percent of the total population. The NAACP reports “one in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001 and if current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime.”

In the vast majority of cases, spending time in prison destroys a person’s economic situation today and, in many situations, the rest of their lives. Losing one generation to prison usually ensures their children will also be born poor and forced to attend lousy public schools, thus perpetuating the cycle. Public schools where violence in the norm. Public schools that operate more as day-care and institutional holding cells than as institutes of education. Public schools where even the top performers are not prepared for college.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.”

But the public education system is doing neither for the poor souls forced to attend these life-destroying institutions.

How many of the problems of the inner-cities in general and of black Americans in particular find their roots in generations of failed education? We will never address the issues of race, crime, poverty and the pathologies they unleash until we at least provide an opportunity for every child in America to attend a quality school where their intelligence and character are developed to the peak of their potential.

Will every parent and child take advantage of this? Of course not. But until everyone who wants it is given a true opportunity to send their kids to quality schools, this country will fail in its basic commitment to those poorest among us. And, when you consider the resulting crime statistics and the cost of filling our prisons, that’s a problem for all of us.

For the richest country the world has ever seen to allow this destruction to these young lives is simply wrong. Not every parent is “parent-of-the-month” material but at least let’s give those who cry out for help a chance by offering them a school which at least have the potential to save their life rather than destroy it.

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John Conlin is an expert in organizational design and change.  He is the founder and President of E.I.C. Enterprises, www.eicenterprises.org, a 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated to spreading the truth here and around the world, primarily through K-12 education. 

He’s seen first-hand the harm being caused by our nation’s schools and believes it’s time to do something about that.  E.I.C. Enterprise’s GoFundMe page can be found at https://www.gofundme.com/so-you-believe-in-science-eh