Pygmalion Effect

As a young, idealistic student looking to make a difference, I decided my life mission was to teach.

In the first quarter of the education curriculum, I took a course called "Educational Foundations". In the course, I learned about the Pygmalion Effect; the self fulfilling prophecy of believing that if students can't learn, they won't. It was taught in the context of white teachers believing that black students can't learn so the teachers will teach down to the them. It made perfect sense. I believe President Bush called it the "soft bigotry of low expectations."

Unfortunately, the very next quarter, a different professor started espousing a theory that black students could not learn in a rote environment. I challenged her position, noting the pygmalion effect we learned about in the previous quarter. After she spent the rest of the class dressing me down as a racist and an idiot, I decided the Education College was full of ding-dongs, derelicts, and douche bags.

Flash forward 25 years, we have a riot at a local basketball game, on Martin Luther King's Day no less, and one of the coaches, Walt McBride, claims that the reason for the riot was "lack of security".

Out of curiosity, when will African-Americans start raising the bar on their community? Shouldn't it be a given that you should be able to go to a high school basketball game without fear of being attacked? When can whites and blacks alike call out a community without being labeled a racist or an Uncle Tom? When will the Bill Cosby's and Thomas Sowell's finally get some traction and communities start listening to what they have to say?

Instead, we get the continued lowering of standards for African-Americans..... soft bigotry of low expectations. Who is really empowering the Pygmalion Effect?