The Last Public Place: Saving Public Education & the End of Affirmative Action

Mari Matsuda of the Georgetown University Law Center will give a presentation entitled, "The Last Public Place: Saving Public Education and the End of Affirmative Action"

What is the fulcrum with which we can leverage ourselves out of the sorry wasteland of post-industrial greed and decay? In one life-time, we have gone from a nation of promise, welcomed as liberators in the villages of Europe, determined to build the best schools at home, committed to providing the basic necessities of life for all who could not provide for themselves, to a nation scared of generosity.

The fear says, “If we give the necessities of life to THOSE people, they will just take and take and never learn to provide for themselves.” We fought a war on poverty based on the opposite idea: provide a child in need with food, shelter, and education, and reap back tenfold the future contributions of that child to the polity. Through well-funded and widely disseminated ideological ju jitsu, the right replaced that simple truth with the compelling lie that anything the government tries to do about poverty is wasteful and counterproductive.

If we are to live out the ideas of equality and democracy that justify our existence as a nation, we must reclaim the public: the notion of a public realm infused with responsibility to the least advantaged, the notion of the state as facilitator of our human flourishing. We are entitled to libraries open seven days a week, to public-funded art and music filling the streets, to quality health care and child care on demand. Why have we stopped demanding this? The very last place in which Americans are willing to place a tiny claim of entitlement to the public good is in our schools.

We are at the crossroads of paradox: we still believe that quality public education for all is a reasonable request, but we act in ways that make that request impossible to fulfill. This lecture explores the politics of learned futility, asking why we have refused to support the only form of affirmative action that really would end the effects of race, class, and gender subordination: providing an excellent public education for every child. In her reluctant support of affirmative action, Supreme Court Justice O’Connor expressed her belief that racial remediation should last no longer than 25 years. A mass coalition demanding that public education become our national priority is the only hope of ever ending the need for affirmative action. This lecture imagines how it will happen.

Event Sponsor
UHM/EWC International Cultural Studies Certificate Program

More Information
Kalawaia Moore, 944-7243, culture@hawaii.edu

Ongoing Events