Save Percentages For Arithmetic Class

Here’s my first test question for everyone on San Francisco’s school board: If a student wants to read an author of any race, are you going to stop that student?

You have to ask questions like that when you’re dealing with San Francisco school board members.

A majority of them proposed last week to set racial quotas on the authors kids are assigned to read in school.

We are dealing with the reading police, and a bad case of political correctness insanity.

Fortunately, San Francisco Superintendent of Schools Bill Rojas says he opposes percentage quotas on the race of authors, and will lobby against them. However, he would have to go along if the school board voted for proposed requirements of 70 percent “authors of color.”

Rojas says that even though he opposes racial quotas on authors, he favors more multicultural readings. In San Francisco, a city official seemingly is required to reverentially intone the word “multicultural” at least three times a day. It’s our Pledge of Allegiance.

The school district’s list of recommended readings is a good one, with great books by authors of many backgrounds, styles and points of view. For quota purposes, though, the school board would reduce them to ethnic labels like European American, Asian American and African American.

Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” is a wonderful novel, but it’s Nigerian, not African American. How do you count that? Or how do you count the white Alan Paton’s “Cry the Beloved Country” about South Africa?

Does the skin color of these authors make any difference?

Just get kids to read the books, any good books. Introduce them to the wonders of Toni Morrison. Show them what it was like for poor people during the Depression in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Good teachers help kids get interested in things well beyond themselves because kids come into the world interested, and there’s a whole world to be interested in. Save percentages for arithmetic class.

Certain school board members want to cut the literary world up into percentages for kids, not necessarily so kids will read but because those school board members have political agendas.

They’re playing identity politics, perhaps in hope of being elected to the city Board of Supervisors, of all great goals in life. These are real losers and they get to mess with kids’ heads.

Test question No.2 for school board members: Are you relevant to young people’s lives or just a big joke across the nation?

On a television talk show the other day, a school board member said he wanted to eliminate Shakespeare as a required author because he isn’t “relevant” to kids today.

Perhaps he should watch the latest movie version of “Romeo and Juliet” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, featuring multicultural youth gangs speaking Shakespearean lines while armed with pistols on the streets of Miami.

Shakespeare is pretty adaptable. School board members who now are clamoring for quotas of gay and lesbian authors should consider that authorship of his plays is disputed. Maybe he was gay, what with all the men in tights and young men playing women.

The school board worries an awful lot about stereotyping but those on it insist on stereotyping Shakespeare, a 16th-century English person who went so far beyond his time as to write a great black title role.

Question No.3 for school board members, and Superintendent Rojas, too: Does literature, and the human experience it represents, consist entirely of gender, ethnicity and empowerment?

The school district asks teachers to consider the following seven questions, and none others, when analyzing literary works:

What ethnic groups are represented? What role do women and/or men play in the literature?

How are women, people of color, differently abled persons, gays and lesbians portrayed?

How are children and elders portrayed?

How are poverty, economic class and other social issues addressed?

Is the material historically accurate?

How does the literature depict cultural and social conflicts and their resolutions?

Is assimilation depicted as the only solution?

Is credit given to individuals and groups of people for struggling to achieve solutions against economic injustice and racism?

No wonder kids are bored shiftless in school. No wonder they don’t want to read. This is not about literature. This is about politics, boring politics, the kind of ‘60s politics that accumulated in the education business, much as toxins accumulate in the liver.

How about asking kids, just for starters, “Was it good? Was it well-written? Did it move you? Does it make you want to read more by that author?”

Oops, sorry, you’ve already had your quota of that author’s race.

Do you want to tell a kid that?

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