Counter-Currents
1,352 words
Part 1
It has been said, “Teaching is the greatest act of optimism”, and it is. I just retired from education after thirty-plus years as a high school teacher. I brought tremendous creativity, energy, and a little irreverence to my teaching, and students would tell you mine was one of their most enjoyable classes. Now in my 60s, I just don’t have the same enthusiasm I once did. My optimism for what is trending in public education is also running on fumes. Like a skilled party guest, it’s important to know when to leave.
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It is said that you only need a sip of wine to know if the bottle is any good. What about three decades of “sips” in many classrooms? My first public school teaching position was in an “urban” Nevada school that was so gang-infested that one vice principal wore a kevlar vest under his button down shirt. I once asked a Hispanic student in one of the gangs, “Why don’t you warring gang kids band together and become a united group? You have so many of the same struggles.” He said, “Because if we’re better than at least one other gang at least we’re better than somebody, Holmes.” Telling.
By and large I genuinely liked the Spanish-speaking kids mostly because they interacted with me (as a bilingual) differently than they did with other teachers who weren’t. For the most part I found them friendly enough so long as you gave them a fair shake and never ‘dissed’ them. Hispanics are one-on-one reciprocal in interpersonal assessment, something I liked about them. That said, once you get beyond a percentage tipping point, they’re just as “our race over yours” as blacks.
The impact of illegal aliens on America’s schools is tectonic. The tax dollars spent to serve illegals (and feed and provide them health care) in our schools is obscene. Federal costs alone come to nearly seven billion dollars. In my state of Tennessee there is about $383 million in education spending on undocumented students (2017 figures.) Certainly it’s more now. Educating/serving children in foreign languages is twice as much per person as native born children. What do we get for this cash hemorrhage? Staggering truancy, a spike in discipline issues, low test scores and a high school dropout rate three times the white rate and twice the black rate. They receive free education, free meals, often free day care, and free medical services in school, yet, as with blacks, they loudly demand more rights, privileges, and entitlements. Mainstreaming these students into the regular classroom doesn’t serve them very well and results in a lower common denominator that puts a drag chute on higher performing students. (Much more on this to follow.)
What’s the impact of non-English speaking illegal alien students in America’s schools? You will find no research on this vital question, absolutely none. A significant number of our urban schools are a Third World culture that does not value education, accepts their children becoming pregnant and dropping out, and adamantly refuses to assimilate. You’re paying for that.
The main reason for the present day mess is the 1982 Plyler v. Doe Supreme Court (5-4) decision. This judgment upheld that “A state cannot prevent children of undocumented immigrants from attending public school unless a substantial state interest is involved.” (It is undeniable that today, 45 years later, a very substantial state interest is involved when it comes to screening students for their legal citizenship status.) The court determined that to deny enrollment to such children violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Fast forward. We need a new assessment of “equal protection” in 2024 to factor in the protection of children born to American citizens who have the right to self-actualize, deserve freedom of association, and must be safe in the schools where their families’ taxes underwrite those schools with their tax dollars.
Here’s the immigrant net-net: nearly one out of four (23 percent) students in public schools come from immigrant-headed households, both legal and illegal (2021 statistic.) This is double the 11 percent in 1990 and more than triple the 7 percent in 1980. About 90 percent of all immigration inflow has been non-European since 1970, and the 3rd World/PoC floodgates are wide open. You do the math.
The black kids at the Nevada school weren’t “simpatico” with the Hispanics (typical), and showed open hostility towards them during any Hispanic heritage event while insisting on special recognition for anything, everything, black. Both groups shared a generally apathetic attitude towards bettering themselves through education, though the Hispanic kids were very hard working at their manual labor jobs outside of school. A notable point of difference was that the Hispanic kids still seemed to listen to and had a modicum of respect for their mothers. The family orientation for them was strong to the point of them being truant for the slightest family reason. The black kids showed mostly eye-rolling tolerance for their mothers despite the volume and bluster they generated. Black mothers did more shouting and hitting than any other race that I taught. Dad was mostly nowhere to be found.
My experience with both groups of students “of color” was the same in several other school systems across the country where I worked. The most dysfunctional school I taught in was in the inner city of a major Southern city that was overwhelmingly black. Ironically, it was the highest paycheck I’d ever earned as a teacher with the most massive budget of any school system I’d ever experienced, and the most spectacular waste of time and tax dollars I’d ever been party to.
My average day there was teaching mostly kids with no want, need, or use for education except as a place to go during the day to do anything but learn. Drug dealing was common, bullying was everywhere, fights happened nearly every day. The school had a day care for teenagers’ children, themselves babies, who had their own babies. My classes were stocked with few kids who were there to really apply themselves (though there were some, and I deeply respected their dedication.) Standards were low, and administration pressured teachers to not write up kids for “minor” things that disrupted the learning in the classroom (read: short of a full-on brawl in your classroom, don’t burden us with your problem). The subtle imperative there was: keep the kids in your room, out of the halls, don’t bother Admin with whatever they do short of needing crime tape. Some teachers rolled with it and allowed their rooms to become little more than loitering spaces with the unspoken understanding that students could do anything they wanted so long as they were relatively quiet about it. I wasn’t one of them.
Once I called out a student who was carrying on in the back of my room during a lesson. The student’s posse swarmed me with objection to my asserting control in my class. I telegraphed an I’m-not-having-it tone. My response to them was, “I seriously doubt she’s going to need psychological help over this situation that is, by the way, none of your business.” Thirty minutes later I was summoned to the principal’s office and told that four girls in my class stood as witnesses that I had told the fifth that “she had psychological problems.” I stood on what really happened. The principal urged me to “take one for the team” and sign an already drafted reprimand that would go in my personnel file. “Nobody sees these things, anyway,” he told me.
The principal wasn’t going to have my back, so I wasn’t going to remain there. Several months later, that spring, all five new hires in my department resigned. The department chair, a kindly older white woman, who was more mother to them than teacher, remained. Mrs. X was imbued with white savior complex to the point of having a washer and dryer in her classroom for students to use. The whole place was more of a health and human service mini mall than a school. A few years later President Obama visited the school and told students, “I’ve heard great things about this high school and all of you.”
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18 comments
When I think about all the ways the United States is hemorrhaging money, and how much of it serves overt, covert, and unintentional systems of racial wealth transfer, it shocks me – both that we let it happen and that we can manage to stagger along despite it. But for how long? We’re drained. It can’t last forever.
I think about the things we could have done instead, the equivalent of hundreds of Apollo programs, and despair. Where could we be now if we had put those tens of trillions of dollars into developing and advancing ourselves rather than babysitting the hateful, ungrateful hordes?
Speaking about Apollo:
Our survival, our posterity requires a Perpetuity Plan:
-reclaim our homelands,
-Breakaway Civilization.
What does this mean, what does this look like?
ALL non-Europeans shall leave European homelands. Our new constitution to be explicit in detailing for example – Ireland is the homeland of the Irish People in perperuity (Irish is Jus Sanguinis – by blood).
Simultaneously, we embark on our Breakaway Civilization (100% segregation separation in perpetuity) to continue our journey to the stars where we left off in 1972 on our unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Apollo 17 in 1972 was our last Moon landing – Apollo 18 & 19 were canceled. Instead, we invested in uplifting others via diversity at the expensive of our people. Result? No future for our children & we got hundreds of thousands if not millions of our people attacked, rapid, killed, murdered.
NEVER AGAIN.
XIV VERBA
I’ll be a contrarian here. If the government doesn’t have the balls to return the illegals back to the countries where they belong, then it might as well educate (or try to educate) their kiddos. The results of not putting them in school would be 1) they would be more ignorant than they’re normally predisposed to being, and 2) hordes of uneducated yoots would be roaming the streets with nothing to do during the day except cause trouble. Granted, educating them is expensive, but the proper remedy for this problem, of course, is that the government should have the balls to send the illegals back to the countries where they belong.
Other than that, I rather like bilingual education. I’m not a CivNat, so I don’t even want them to assimilate. When they know their ancestral language, it’s easier to send them back to the countries where they belong.
Long long ago in a galaxy far away, I lived in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn when it was a Puerto Rican slum and I taught for a couple of years in the local Catholic all-boys high school. Mostly White working class, with a smattering of Ricans and the occasional Black.
As a young teacher only 6-7 years old than the kids, it was a Kafkaesque experience. But compared to the local public high school where you could hear the bedlam through the windows a block away, and compared to the intervening decades, it was a breeze. The boys were predictably rowdy but never violent, their parents took a dim view of truancy, and the school has a reasonable amount of order. Sounds like Camelot now.
The one Black kid in class gave me a lot of grief. On parent-teacher night, he came with his Caribbean father and mother, old school Brit-style Blacks, now extinct, and when I diplomatically pointed out that his behavior needed improvement, his father turned to him and said, “You dare disobey the teacher, boy?” and backhanded him across the mouth, putting him on the floor.
I was shocked. Then. Now it’s just a happy memory.
We are the only race in history who’ve wasted untold resources in treasure and life on barbaric inferior hordes intent only on draining us and replacing us, while demanding nothing of them. It still baffles me.
I enjoyed the article. My brief experience with a public middle school was enlightening. It was about 95% hispanic, 4% black and 1% white. Nearly every child received breakfast and lunch for no charge and the waste was astounding. They also could remain on campus until fivish for no charge. All of this free stuff despite everyone having a late model phone and fabulous new shoes. And parents driving better late model cars than me. Classroom disruption was tolerated and made obvious by moving the disrupters desks away from the rest. I got to coach the 7th grade boys basketball team and we won the consolation side of the league tournament. It was a good moment and I was surprised when a latino man in his 30’s, with obvious tattoos aplenty, came up to me after the game and politely thanked me for allowing his son to play on the team. Manny, his son, was my best player but had enrolled too late to join regularly. I let him join and the other kids welcomed him too. I heard it was gang ties that were the problem why he came in late. I must state the mexican children were slightly better behaved and accepting of coaching than the blacks. Having parents around, even if here illegally and gaming the system, was better than the directionless blacks. California used to be a beacon of hope for the country. Now it’s closer to third world hellhole. Mine was in Bakersfield.
I deeply commend Paul Bianco for writing this article. I enjoyed it greatly. To the author: please write more about your school experiences and your thoughts on current educational trends in North America. I believe Bianco fits a niche that is lacking in Counter Currents, namely the education front. I look forward to reading more of your articles!
Daycare for the Third-World.
Sorry, a little off-topic.
I assume that by “urban” school in Nevada, Las Vegas is meant. Las Vegas and Clark County is something like three-fourths of the population of the entire state.
I first started school in 1966 at the Paradise neighborhood of Las Vegas near the McCarran airport and across from the main UNLV campus to the North, which was then open desert fields from what I can remember. My Kindergarten teacher was the wife of a fighter pilot from Nellis Air Force Base.
Liberace’s mansion is just around the corner from the school but I don’t remember if that was true then. Today from the parking lot of the school off the Tropicana Avenue arterial ─ then practically a county road ─ if you look to the West you can see the Luxor pyramid and the Mandalay Bay casino where the mass shooting happened in 2017.
But in 1966, all things were different. No Blacks. Almost none. It was essentially an ethnostate. And I walked home to and from school as a five or six-year-old, and as long as I didn’t dilly-dally too much as my Mother would say, she was never worried.
Las Vegas was basically pioneered by Mormons as a watering hole for the railroad or a waypoint between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. I like the climate, which isn’t really that hot until Summer, and it was (at least it was then) what Southwesterners call a Dry Heat. With low humidity, we got by with a swamp cooler or no AC at all.
A few neighborhood kids had Color TV sets in their homes which we shared with them sometimes, and that was when the three major networks started default-broadcasting in Color (1965). The only downside that I can think of was that my parents could not stand the taste of the Las Vegas tap water, so we actually had bottled water delivered to our door and an office-style water cooler with a tank on top.
But the proximity of Las Vegas to L.A. made it too easy for Jews like Bugsy Siegel to bring in casinos ─ and the building of the Boulder Dam in the late 1930s brought cheap electricity and air conditioning and neon lights for the high-rollers, which changed the town.
After the 1960s, the vapid growth turned Las Vegas into a sewer. Fine enough to visit on a fun occasion but not to live there. And of course the Negroes came. As they do.
When my family first came to Las Vegas in 1965, my Dad was a reliability engineer who had designed some features on the Minuteman ICBM, which pioneered solid fuel rocket motor guidance technology. He had just finished his Masters in Mathematics & Statistics and was now employed by Doc Edgerton of MIT and analyzing the reliability data from nuclear weapons tests at the nearby Nevada Test Site.
At first we stayed in a tall hotel and the tinsel town aspects of Las Vegas at that time were more modest and tolerable than they are today.
You would occasionally see a celebrity in the grocery store like Carey Grant who had just married Dyan Canon. The stores all had “one-armed bandits” (slot machines) in them but we never went to casinos ─ although sometimes my Dad would drive us down the Strip to look at the neon, and we always got a kick out of the “Howdy Parder” moving cowboy sign on Fremont Street, which you now have to go inside a giant mall if you want to see it today. (They have also gayed-up the cowboy “Vegas Vic” from the way he looked in the 1950s and ’60s.)
When we were staying in the hotel and I was watching Captain Kangaroo from the Black & White TV, I could look out over the Mojave Desert from the height and it was breathtaking ─ and just as spectacular at night with the grids of street lights. Now there is too much smog to rekindle that youthful experience.
Also, Las Vegas has no concept of “preservational architecture.” It was all made to be showy but not to last long enough to show your Grandkids. Hoover Dam is an exception and some time ago they built a visitor’s center which reportedly cost more than the dam itself. There is now also a modern interstate bridge so no trucks or through-traffic crosses the dam any longer.
The modern Paradise grade school on Tropicana that I referred to earlier was built in 1949 or something like that, and it was preserved, which is an exception. I keep hearing rumors that it is going to be torn down, but not so far. It is now a continuing education campus or office space for UNLV.
When we left Las Vegas for nuclear New Mexico a few years later, the iconic Landmark hotel ─ looking like something out of the TV show Mad Men, and until 1969 the tallest building in Nevada ─ was being finished, and like most things in Las Vegas, was demolished later.
Today Las Vegas is a polluted multikulti rathole, which hit “peak Negro” like an airliner hitting a mountaintop. The Chamber of Commerce dubbed it “Sin City” in the 1990s. It’s nice to visit for a weekend attending a convention or something at company expense, but I wouldn’t live there.
🙂
Thank you for sharing this. That’s interesting to know about the Mormon bit. That sure did backfire on them, the whole watering hole to LA. Then again, I don’t think many Mormons would want to domicile in LA either anymore. Interesting story about your Dad. This was before your time but a picture that reflects peak white America https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/12b7h8k/1953_las_vegas_nv_swimming_with_nuclear_testing/ just a summer day with a nuclear bomb test going on over the horizon.
Yeah, the swimming pools were great. A nice way to cool off on a Summer day. And no Blacks. 😉
Mormons used to be pretty good with the hospitality industries. The founder of the Marriot Corporation, J. Willard Marriot (1900-1985) was LDS. A non-Mormon elderly lady friend of mine who immigrated from Germany after the war and worked for him in New York City, said that he was a delightful boss.
I am told that the LDS taught the outsiders the trade moving into town after the Hoover Dam was completed. Howard Hughes, who moved there to be a recluse and owned a Las Vegas hotel or two, at least said that he liked to hire Mormons to manage his affairs because they were trustworthy and honest.
L.A. has its charms and beaches and stuff, and it might have been great to live there in the 1930s or ’40s, but it’s an acquired taste.
🙂
Lovely reminiscence. There was surely corruption and some regrettable practices in old America. But I don’t think the people and institutions– apart from the federal government– were corrupted and degraded as they are now.
I think a lot about how to bring that kind of White life forward. It’s not nostalgia; I’m not trying to turn back the clock. But, rather, how to recreate in its essential elements the way of life that best suits White people.
My best friend has been an inner city teacher for decades. He too would take a massive pay cut by relocating to white suburbs. He also said that Latino kids are much more friendly and tolerable compared to blacks. He claims that when there would be fights between the two groups by lunch time the parents on both sides would be at the school ready to duke it out. In his words Latino kids were far more polite and respectful but had zero interest in learning. Blacks were just useless.
if you are a 1980s veteran, i am very curious to understand the declining trajectory of education. When did it become special ed? When did the students all become single mom products? What was more debilitating, new admins without teaching experience, budget issues, Gates’ privitazation, or less white kids?
I was a student in your first teaching years to your mid-career. In the North, outside of the ghetto, teaching was a well-paid, low effort job, in fact, sucking me in to an abortive career change ten years ago.
Please tell me how it rotted out? In 2003 it was still fine.
I noticed the Supreme Court case, demanding states fund illegal immigrant education was passed by a Jewish court member, Blackmon, citing, you guessed it, the equal protection clause, a Civil War area law created to ensure fomer african slaves–AMerican citizens, would not have their rights abrogated–Blackmon made his decision eclusively a “what’s good for the Jews.”
How is that good for the Jews. As a Jew, I abhor The fact that that most of us are flaming Liberals. We’ve been chased out of many safe neighborhoods( Lots of nostalgia for those old safe neighborhoods), not only by crime of blacks and Hispanics but also by Asians, you can live around, but you can’t afford to be around them. I hate the hypocrisy of Jews, that must make a lot of money to be the only ones who can afford to escaped diversity and who his neighbors neighborhoods are not overrun totally by Asians. We’re not all rich. The orthodox Jews are conservative and the Talmud is just five books of the Old Testament hardly a Koran or a plan to take over the world-which the Koran is. The secular Jews have weak family life and and don’t reproduce. They have luxury beliefs.
I told many my Jewish friends that this current anti-Semitism is more anti-white.
Thank you for your perspective. I can see how sweeping statements lack subtlety. If it helps, references like that to “The Jews” generally don’t refer to everyone. Instead, they refer to certain leadership types, their NGOs, and their supporters who act maliciously, rather like a white-collar Mafia. Ironically, their unwise and counterproductive behavior harms their own community at least as much as it does the rest of us.
That is some kicker of a finishing line! I was 16/17 in 2008. Upon seeing the news across the ocean that the USA, a black man would become President, I really thought we were heading for a ‘Command Bridge on the SS Enterprise’ future! How wrong I was, safely tucked away in a (then) fairly homogenous white place. The learning curve has been steep, but there’s only one future I want: our own people, doing our own thing, mostly alone, not bothering anyone.
I lasted 3 years in government schools. 1 in a huge southern suburban middle school and 2 in elementary. The middle school was the worse. The blacks called me “raysiss” when I called them out and the Latinos called me pork chop. Still don’t know what that means. I think I was lucky, cause the subject I was in attracted the better students. It was the admin that drove me out.
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