Schools not serving young blacks

Recently I got together with a guy who grew up in my oldneighborhood in Harlem, around 145th St. and St. Nicholas Avenue. Aswe talked about the old days, the world that we discussed seemed likesomething from another planet, compared with today.

There have been many good changes but, on net balance, it isdoubtful whether kids growing up in our old neighborhood today haveas much chance of rising out of poverty as we did.

That is not because poverty is worse today. It is not. My friendremembers times when his father would see that the children were fed,but would go to bed without eating dinner himself. There were othertimes when his father would walk to work in downtownManhattan_several miles away_rather than spend the nickel it took toride the subway.

Things were not quite that grim for me, but my family was by nomeans middle class. None of the adults had gotten as far as theseventh grade. Down South, before we moved to New York, most of theplaces where we lived did not come with frills like electricity orhot running water.

Some people have said that my rising from such a background wasunique. But it was not. Many people from that same neighborhood wenton to have professional careers, and I am by no means either the bestknown or the most financially successful of them.

Harry Belafonte came out of the same building where my oldschoolmate lived. One of the guys from the neighborhood was listed inone of the business magazines as having a net worth of more than $200million today. If anyone had told me then that one of the guys on ourblock was going to grow up to be a multimillionaire, I would havewondered what he was drinking.

Not everybody made it. One of my old buddies was found shot deadsome years ago, in what looked like a drug deal gone bad. But manypeople from that neighborhood went on to become doctors, lawyers, andacademics_at least one of whom became a dean and another a collegepresident.

My old schoolmate retired as a psychiatrist and was livingoverseas, with servants, until recently deciding to return home. Buthome now is not Harlem. He lives in California wine country.

Why are the kids in that neighborhood today not as likely to havesuch careers_especially after all the civil rights "victories" andall the billions of dollars worth of programs to get people out ofpoverty?

What government programs gave was transient and superficial. Whatthey destroyed was more fundamental.

My old schoolmate recalls a teacher seeing him eating his brownbag lunch in our school lunchroom. A forerunner of a later generationof busybodies, she rushed him over to the line where people werebuying their lunches and gave some sign to the cashier so he wouldnot have to pay.

Bewildered at the swift chain of events, he sat down to eat andthen realized what had happened. He had been given charity! He gaggedon the food, and then went to the toilet to spit it out.

He went hungry that day because his brown bag lunch had beenthrown out. He had his pride_and that pride would do more for him inthe long run than any lunches.

His father also had his pride. He tore to shreds a questionnairethe school had sent home to find out about their students' livingconditions. Today, even middle-class parents with Ph.D.s tamely goalong with this kind of meddling. Moreover, people like his fatherhave been made superfluous by the welfare state_and made to look likechumps if they pass it up.

What the school we went to gave us was more precious than gold. Itwas an education. That was what schools did in those days.

We didn't get mystical talk about the rain forests, and nobodygave us condoms or chirped about diversity. And nobody would tolerateour speaking anything in school but the king's English.

After finishing junior high school, my friend was able to pass thetest to get into the Bronx High School of Science, where the averageIQ was 135, and yours truly passed the same test to get intoStuyvesant High School, another selective public school that today'scommunity "leaders" denounce as elitist.

The rest is history. But it is a history that today's young blacksare unlikely to hear_and are less likely to repeat.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at Hoover Institute in Californiaand an author.