Some time back while surfing the Internet, the following article concerning the Florida Board of Education came to my attention from the Palm Beach Post:

On Tuesday, the board passed a revised strategic plan that says that by 2018, it wants 90 percent of Asian students, 88 percent of white students, 81 percent of Hispanics and 74 percent of black students to be reading at or above grade level. For math, the goals are 92 percent of Asian kids to be proficient, whites at 86 percent, Hispanics at 80 percent and blacks at 74 percent. It also measures by other groupings, such as poverty and disabilities.

The gist of such an educational policy, amongst other terms that are too vitriolic to utter in polite company, has been chronicled fittingly as the "Soft Racism of Lowered Expectations," and its unspoken assumptions are predicated on the belief that certain races or cultures are existentially mired in a chronic state of inferiority. A question then begs to be asked of those making the assumption: are these inequalities hard-wired, culture-bound, or effectively reinforced by a group's own preconceptions? If they are the latter, are such self-imposed shackles themselves an admission that one's group is incapable of intellectually competing with other groups on a level playing field?

Now, while some may deem that there is a socio-economic component to academic failure, the conservative mind intuitively knows that such blanket judgments are patently false. We know this anecdotally because our experiences have revealed to us how poor children throughout the earth, with any access at all to a viable education, jump at the chance of learning and are only limited by their desire to achieve. Clearly, the fact that a school board should set race based goals lends an air of authority to that ugly Darwinian spore of Nazi Doctrine -- the mendacious calumny that race equals thought.

Using the moral art of empathy, imagine yourself as a young black child and learning that those august purveyors of learning have compassionately decreed that your people should occupy the bottom rung of predicted inferiority. In all honesty, how would you interpret the notion that your "race" requires the equivalent of an educational Marshall Plan in order to redeem it from the burden of its own nature? Would not such a morally condescending policy render African Americans frustrated and angry as it foolishly planted seeds of bitterness among differing cultures: cultivating animosity against groups that are not identified as being educational basket cases? Would not such a bleak subliminal message instill in the bottom groupings a sickening meme of despair -- and help instead to further reinforce the cancerous fatalism that attends such an institutionally driven self-fulfilling prophesy of inadequacy?

It is becoming increasingly self-evident that social engineering policies, which are fueled by inadequate or ill-conceived assumptions concerning our human condition, lead to even deeper pathologies once they come in contact with the frigid and unforgiving air of rock-hard reality. Having begun the Great Society Program with the lofty intentions of equalizing racial inequalities through fundamentally flawed assumptions concerning the causal nature of those differences, the presumptuous liberal regime created corrosive incentives that eviscerated the mother-father family unit. We now know that such misbegotten policies had the unintended effect of kicking the husband out the back door while Uncle Sam moved in through the front. Rather than solving the poverty equation, therapeutic social engineers succeeded only in institutionalizing it and distorting America's entire array of racial expectations: effectively filtering race through the prism of disaffected grievance and cultivating that species of sullen helplessness by differentially staggering the cultural bar -- all by virtue of the pseudo-pedagogy of sympathetic but racist preconceptions.

Despite the self-serving ideological mantras of social engineers, children of any race or cultural identity are savvy enough to pick up and run with the tacit subliminal templates that have been fashioned for them. And while a significant portion of Urban Black Culture learned all too well the self-defeating habits that come by working the system, this same body also drank deeply of that fatal unspoken perversity: that pursuing a viable education with due diligence was inherently "acting white." Therein, the learning pyramid became seen as a difficult "sucker's bet" over the sure thing of collecting government largesse, pursuing sports, music, or the less demanding avenues of dubious commerce. Consequently, rather than diminishing, the underclass expanded and normalized its subculture into the greater whole -- its governmentally nourished roots tapping deeply into the mainstream culture until it eventually projected its numbing toxins into America writ large.

Like a cold slap in the face, the brilliant Thomas Sowell offers us a fitting perspective on how far down the ladder we have fallen in the span of a single lifetime:

"If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today."

In as much as American society holds firm to the degenerate belief that our current 19th century intellectual vintage of racial determinism is a prophetic iron law set in genetic granite, we err stupendously. Similarly, if we rationalize that a group's subterranean cultural baggage is too entrenched for it to wear down and overcome, we are dead in the water before we even begin. Indeed, if we are honest, we will find that we have all along been crippled by liberalism's host of eugenic monstrosities: the fruit of assumptions birthed in the Frankenstein laboratory of social science's cruel and artificial abstractions. Genuine human life runs deeper than any political or economic overlays, and this richness runs counter to the desiccated Marxian spirit of this bedeviled age. The values and virtues of endurance, marital fidelity, longsuffering, temperance, courage, moderation, piety, and a deep abiding faith and love mean a thousand times more than the babble that seeps out of Socialist-tainted graduate schools which portray men as fundamentally inert hunks of blank slate: biologically determined and plastic beings in whom it is necessary only to apply a few electrodes in order to watch them rise up and dance.

Glenn Fairman writes from Highland, Ca. He can be contacted at arete5000@dslextreme.com.