America’s historic strength is not diversity, but an enforced commonality of value.
I attended one of the premier educational institutions in the United States in the nineteen fifties: P.S. 104 on the corner of 95th Street and Fifth Avenue in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It’s still there. But as Dr. Thomas Sowell said about one he attended in those years, it might be the “same building” but it’s not the “same school.”
Despite the fact that my wonderful grandmother was a native Swedish speaker P.S. 104 didn’t feel compelled to celebrate my “heritage” the way it would today. They taught me where Sweden was because we studied geography (and don’t we wish our children still did) but not to put too fine a point on it, they knew I wasn’t growing up in Stockholm. I had a friend whose father was a senior NCO at the Fort Hamilton Army Base a few blocks away and nobody went lyrical about how he, just by being black and therefore “different”, enriched our educational experience either. I had another friend whose father had flown a Focke-Wulf 200 multi-engine bomber for the Luftwaffe during WWII and it goes without saying that there wasn’t a chance in hell of anybody applauding his antecedents. Or for that matter the fact that another’s father was deputy something-or-other at the Yugoslav mission to the United Nations, another’s a survivor of the Holocaust or maybe just up from Puerto Rico with the family hoping to start a better life.
None of that mattered.
Instead the school simply thought it should do its job. Shape every kind of child white, black, brown, short, tall, skinny, kids with Coke-bottle glasses, kids dragging one leg behind them into useful citizens by teaching them how to read and write English well while at the same time having them master eight years of arithmetic, penmanship, history, and civics. And boy weren’t they lucky if they got to do just half that because most of us, the boys at least, would much rather be playing stickball or dangling a crab net off the sea wall in Shore Road Park.
Of course, in looking back I see that that principal (there were no administrators then) and those teachers did themselves proud, and that I loved them.
Flash forward fifty years. A long piece appears in The New York Daily News entitled: “We’re ready for real diversity.” It’s author is Shino Tanikawa a mother of two in public schools in Manhattan who has a completely different, but now very popular take on things. Below is an excerpt:
I also wanted my daughters, who are mixed race, to recognize and embrace their Japanese heritage, and not be ashamed of it as I was in my 20s (a rather stereotypical Asian response to a white-dominant society). For this to happen, I knew they needed to be in a racially diverse environment where they were not the only ones who are “different.”
I knew that public schools are where my children could meet and befriend people who are not like them; there aren’t many other places like that, even in a city known as a melting pot. So I sought out schools with diverse student bodies, and that’s what I got — though in this city, where kids tend to cluster by background, it wasn’t easy to find.
Mixing works. Both my daughters learned a great deal from attending elementary schools where classes had two grades or students with and without disabilities learning together.
What they learned does not show up in their test scores. Rather, they have the ability to see strengths in all people, particularly the ones society might label “difficult.” And they have humility about their status in this society.