Public-School Graduate @abenedikt Attempts Persuasive Writing, Fails

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Allison Benedikt hates Ken White at Popehat, but of course, so does Charles Carreon, and we don’t need to go there just yet. I digress . . .

If You Send Your Kid to Private
School, You Are a Bad Person

That’s an interesting headline, which Allison Benedikt endeavors to justify without success, because she’s an idiot.

I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book. . . . I left home woefully unprepared for college, and without that preparation, I left college without having learned much there either. You know all those important novels that everyone’s read? I haven’t. I know nothing about poetry, very little about art, and please don’t quiz me on the dates of the Civil War. I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine. I’m not saying it’s a good thing that I got a lame education. I’m saying that I survived it, and so will your child, who must endure having no AP calculus so that in 25 years there will be AP calculus for all.

Allison is “doing fine,” because she’s an editor at Slate, where any ill-educated cretin can get hired, as long as they’re a liberal white girl whose wedding was reported by the New York Times.

Oh, and apparently being an anti-Israel Jew helps, too.

Free of knowledge, unencumbered by facts or logic — yes, send your kids to public school so they can be a liberal like Allison Benedikt.

 

78 comments

  1. What the lovely Miss Benedikt has (probably unknowingly) done is to reiterate the arguments of forced busing. Parents were expected to allow the use of their own children as the guinea pigs for social experimentation, in the hope that this would produce some better world a couple of generations hence. How well did that work out?

    As it happens, I was a student in a segregated public school system in the South — yes, I am an old fart — when integration occurred there the way it did in a lot of small southern towns: the black school mysteriously burned to the ground in the summer. We had no problems with integration because there was only one school; there was no forced busing of students passed one school to another further away for social engineering. It turned out that white families didn’t really have a problem with their kids going to school with black kids.

  2. well…. there used to be AP classes for all in my old HS.
    3 AP calculus classes, specifically.
    2 BC, 1 AB (BC is the serious class)

    now, there is but a single AB class.

    she’s not just crazy, she’s flat out wrong.

  3. “I’m not proud of my ignorance. But guess what the horrible result is? I’m doing fine.”

    So she’s not even aware enough to know she’s incredible proud of her ignorance.

    Not that she lets that stop her from opining on anything else.

  4. This young woman may have gone to a “crappy” school, but her continued ignorance is her own choice.

  6. Wow. That is some weapons-grade stoopid.

    Which is what I have come to expect from such precious little leftists…

  7. It used to be said that you could a good Hi Skool education in the US. The only problem is you had to go 4 years of College to get it. I’m not sure the colleges rise to that level anymore. In the UK and Germany you had to be properly educated before you got to a University. From what I can make out from a couple of conversation with a German Prof at Univ of Trier, that isn’t the case anymore, and the UK appears to befalling as well.

  12. ” I’m not proud of my ignorance.”

    Yet, she has done nothing to correct it.

    Allison is what intelligent people call a “self-made fool”.

  13. ” I’m not proud of my ignorance. ” Uh, yes, you are, and stupid too. You know, at some point in your life, at some point during your education, or according to you, the lack thereof, you should become aware of the responsibility to correct the inefficiencies and the shortcomings of said education. At some point you have to take personal responsibility. This despite the fact that personal responsibility is a foreign concept that is distasteful to libs. Stop being proud of your ignorance, your disagreement not withstanding, and confront and correct it. Geez, crack a book that isn’t authored by howard zinn or some such fool and take the effort, the personal effort, to learn something beyond the execrable claptrap that your “friends’ on the left feed you everyday. Grow the f&&k up !

  14. I love how that woman complains about the fact that she’s never read the classics. If only there were some place that you could go to find books. Some large building where you could find shelves upon shelves of books, including many of the classics. Even better, this mystical place would allow you, after registering and paying a small fee, to take these books home for a specified period of time. I know it’s crazy, right?
    You know what’s even crazier? If there were stores where you could buy books, including many that have been used previously, at inexpensive prices. You could take books home and place them on horizontal boards within reach of you children. Perhaps you could even read to them at night when they’re young, and encourage them to read for entertainment as they grow up.

  15. Bavaria is still holding the line, but the other federal states are decline rapidly. The problems started with the trend to eliminate the college track high schools (Gymnasia) in favor of American style high schools where all abilities were thrown together.

  16. In a pinch there’s always “Cliff’s Notes,” which I never used, and there used to be “Golden Key Classic Comics,” which I did use for Moby Dick. And my mom’s house was always full of books, and she read to me at bedtime (when I was young). In fact, I credit her with teaching me how to read (had some trouble in school). If I visit someone at his home, and there are no books visible, I feel vaguely uncomfortable. I credit books by CS Lewis and GK Chesterton with saving my sanity and my soul. I would not be doing “fine” without books, might not have “survived” at all. Tonight I will pray for the repose of the soul Johannes Gutenberg.

  17. I’ve seen a number of posts on various sites about this poorly reasoned and written diatribe. Many are dismissing at as an attempt by Slate to get a bunch of “outrage” hits. I’m not so dismissive. This woman is a skirmisher in the upcoming battles regarding parents’ rights to educate their children. The philosophic underpinnings are many, but they they encompass 1) The Elevation of Diversity to status of diety, i.e. “Smart, well-behaved kids will help the public schools; 2) Envy that some have the willingness and ability to sacrifice to home school or send their kids to parochial school. Stated differently, a Malignant Egalitarianism and 3) Economic, i.e. reducing resources to public education as a drain on the system. All of these arguments are ludicrous on their face, of course. Nevertheless, the teachers’ unions are behind them in full force and have said as much. Indeed, the reason the unions hate alternative education is that the unions have no influence and cannot assert themselves to protect their own. We ignore these sorts of arguments at our peril.

  18. I read the cited pieces by Jeffrey Goldberg and Benedikt, and Zounds!! what a dope she is. no kid either, she is 36. at 26, she was a features editor for the chicago trib, in 2003, in 2011, she was a film critic at the village voice. now, she writes for Salon…talk about downward mobility. and her bitching about her skools is a hoot. she must know of the existence of libraries and bookstores, no???

  19. They never crossed her (unlittered with education or thoughts) mind. She couldn’t even conceive of their existence!
    Quelle supris! What a willfully ignorant waste of human protoplasm!

    To think God wasted a soul on this useless piece of crap.

  20. I’ll say one thing, she is right that libruls who send their kids to private schools aren’t bad. They are only hypocrites of the first water.

  22. I bet she has some sort of device that runs Kindle — where should could get the classics delivered to her, for free.

  23. A perfect illustration of the old saying that “ignorance is bliss”. She is so stupid that she doesn’t even know how stupid she is and she revels in the glory of her ignorance. The Dunning-Kruger effect is evident here.

  26. “Smart, well-behaved kids will help the public schools;”

    As a former teacher myself, all I have to say is..

    BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

    The “good kids” never lift the “bad kids” up; the misbehaving kids always drag the behaving ones down. You don’t even have to have a decent education to observe this, just pay attention to what goes on around you in a classroom.

    And throwing more “good kids” into the mix is an appeal to magic, and the results are as stupid and disappointing as the results of magic always are. (To paraphrase the inimitable P.J. O’Rourke) In financial terms, it’s a phenomenon known as “throwing good money after bad” and it’s a big reason why leftists are “poor”.

  27. Nailed it!!! Thank you!

    Good kids and bright kids should never be punished by the slow kids dragging the class down

    Not that slow kids should be abandoned, but they do not have the right to hurt the otherwise swift progress of the good and bright kids

  28. Proud to be a stupid snowflake! LOL

    When are they going to organize Pride Parades for Stupid Snowflakes??? LOL

    I’d love to watch one and cheer them on 😉

  30. “I went K–12 to a terrible public school.”

    My bet is it was run by liberals – thus crappy is cool, perverted is normal, and MTV is hard thinking homework.

  31. I do want to clarify something, though: I don’t think there are really “good kids” versus “bad kids” until they reach the teenage years, just some with behavioural issues/lazy parents/or just simply ones who cannot handle a classroom environment based on 19th century German values and just cannot settle down. Honestly I think all kids are “good”, just some are easier to deal with than others.

    And it’s pretty damned selfish of Princess to expect that both kids who need more attention and kids who should be taking AP classes are dragged down and neglected uas necessary sacrifices to her precious ideals. A first grader with autism who can think in three dimensions (!) needs his individual needs addressed without compromising the attention a teacher needs to give to the rest of the class, and Miss Pretty Princess needs to go find a library (if she even knows what those are) and start educating herself like I did. No sympathy at all for her dreams of unicorns crapping Skittles.

  33. What I meant by “good” kids is regarding behavior, not their essence. If you have a large number of kids in a class with behavior and attitude problems, the minority of good kids is going to suffer.

  34. That’s what I figured, I just wanted to clarify my own words. When you teach, you do tend to form attachments to all the kids you teach, even the ones from troubled homes. (Sometimes especially those ones)

    And to be fair, I do agree with Ace’s suspicion (in spite of whatever else I don’t necessarily agree with him on) that Slate is just trolling for hits at this point. As one of Ken’s commenters posted, “Nobody talks like an Ayn Rand villain in real life — no one is that honest.”

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