I would like this morning to bring your attention to something rather niche, but nonetheless infinitely important.
Senior educators in America are increasingly advocating for school students to be taught only by teachers who are the same colour as them.
Yes, you read that right.
They say, for instance, that black students do better when they have black teachers, Latino students do better when they have Latino students, and so on…
In an article published on Monday, the authors of a book published last year – called 'Teacher Diversity and Student Success' – have made fresh calls for, quote: “Prioritising teacher race as a policy."
And by the way this is not some minor book nobody takes seriously, this was published by Harvard Education Press, the publishing arm of Harvard University's Graduate School of Education – in other words, by the top university the world has ever known.
Mercy Muroki says senior educators in the US are calling for racial segregation.
Image: GB News
And actually, these authors go further, they say in this new article this: "Policymakers should prioritise diversity even as challenges around vacancies and shortages arise."
In other words, when governments are faced with chronic shortages of teachers, when classes are burgeoning for lack of teachers, and kids of all races are faced with poor quality education as a result.
Even then, even then… these people say the government should still look around and say: “Guys, I know how we can make education better – racially segregating our classes."
I mean, it's beyond madness.
So... how could sane, educated people possibly come to that conclusion, you may ask?
Well, the authors argue in their latest article that having a ‘same-race teacher’ improves students test scores, their attendance increases, as do their chances of going to university.
Many other people, by the way, have researched this issue and come to the same conclusion.
Mercy Muroki expresses her concerns over the education system in the US.
Ben Birchall
Quite frankly, I am not interested in their so-called evidence. You know why? Because sometimes, the ends simply do not justify the means.
Their research is not some sophisticated solution to solving educational inequality.
I'm going to call it out for what it is: out-and-out racial segregation.
Spanish philosopher George Santayana once powerfully said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
And it’s true. History repeats itself.
In 1954, the US Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public education in the famous case of Brown v. Board of Education.
It would be another 10 years until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would rid America of racial segregation laws.
These so-called academics and educators really think that going back to racial segregation in any form is a step forward?
It’s a slippery slope, it’s a reductio ad absurdum of the highest order.
Because once you make the argument that teachers must match the race of their students, then you open the door to all manner of similar demands.
Do disabled students have to be taught by disabled teachers, gay students by gay teachers? What about students who are mixed race – do they get one black teacher and one white teacher? And don’t get me started on religion…
All of this might seem niche and far away, but it matters – it matters because it flies in the face of everything we hold dear about living in a free western society where all races are equal under the law; where we actually want to integrate with different races rather than live in some xenophobic insular community where we assume people who don’t look like us must be bad for us.
And it matters because what happens in America slowly but surely makes its way across the Atlantic and onto the shores of Britain.
If we don’t push back on this morally depraved, pseudo-scientific, segregationist nonsense… we will set western society back decades.