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BLAME THE NEGRO CHILD!
WILKERSON

human beings-in background experiences, academic ability, self-concept, aspiration, motivation, and interpersonal relations. They do not come from a common mold.
We assume that these children have been so scarred by their early experiences in home and community that whatever potential they once had for effective learning has been irreparably damaged. We really do not expect them to learn.
We confront them in school with prepackaged curricular materials and tasks developed for children from a different subculture; and when they fail, we find confirmation of our prior judgment that they lack the experiential background for cognitive growth. Rarely do we accept these children at whatever may be their current stages of development, and then devise materials and methods which serve their needs at that point.
Our whole professional posture tends to be defensive. Prevailing school practice is assumed to be sound; and if the children from the ghetto do not fit into our program, the fault is theirs, not the school's.
Not long ago, Rosenthal and Jacobson conducted an experiment on the West Coast that is highly relevant to the defeatist approach of our schools to the education of black children from the ghetto. They told teachers that some new tests indicated that particular children in their several classes should be expected to show spurts in academic achievement during the year. This was completely untrue; there was no such evidence; and nothing more was said about it after the initial announcements. The teachers went about their work as usual, with no suggestion that anything special be done with the children designated as incipient "bloomers." Yet, tests at the end of the year revealed that these particular children did, indeed, show dramatic spurts in achievement. Apparently the only explanation is that the teachers were led, through deception, to expect the children to show rapid gains.9
The experimenters comment that one reason the disadvantaged "child does poorly in school is because that is what is expected of him. In other words his shortcomings may originate not in his different ethnic, cultural and economic background but in his teachers' response to that background."10
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9Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1968, 240 pp.
10Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, "Teacher Expectations for the Disadvantaged," Scientific American, 218:19-23, April 1968.

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