With no irony whatsover, Kamala Harris stated yesterday in Florida what most of us have been thinking all along.
HARRIS: "Let me start by saying this: I am a product of a public school education. I was sharing with some of the teachers earlier. My first grade teacher, Mrs Francis Wilson, god rest her soul, attended my law school graduation. I am a product of teachers and an educational system that believed in providing the children with the full expanse of information that allowed them to then and encourage them to then reach their own conclusions. Any exercise critical thought. in a way that was directly intended to nurture their leadership. I am fully aware that it is because of that approach that I stand before you, as vice president of the United States."
Which is precisely what most of us have been concerned about in public education.
First, when Harris speaks of public education, she's talking mostly Canadian public schools, based on the schools she went to as a teenager, according to her Wikipedia page. But combined with her education in American public schools, which is also there, Kamala Harris isn't exactly the poster girl for their efficacy of results. Based on her continuously stupid statements, and statements suggesting a lack of basic knowledge about the world, and her inability to speak a word of Spanish from a state that has many Spanish speakers, and the Democrat party's general aversion to having her at the top of the presidential ticket, one can only conclude that they didn't teach her much of anything and she didn't learn much of anything, either. Not knowledge. Not critical thinking.
Some educational highlights:
First, she's never released her transcripts from her public school educations, which is ... interesting.
Second, after all that public school education, she somehow didn't get into Stanford University, despite her father having a professorship there, which normally could get her on the easy legacy 'admit' list so long as she could meet some minimum standards, nor did she go to Canada's most prestigious university, McGill University, where her mother was affiliated as a researcher. She, uh, wasn't exactly prepared for anything fancy after all that public school education, it seems, so she went to lower-ranked Howard University, where more applicants get in.
Third, she flunked the bar the first time she took it, at least once, despite going to a fairly well regarded public law school, the University of California's Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
Then she went to Florida to lecture on slavery, mangling her history more than a little, which is easy to do if you don't know much about history, as the song goes.
Nevertheless, her narrative seems explicitly intending to say that public schools are what made her so smart and so accomplished, let's look again at how she came to where she is.
Was it her schooling that got her into the vice presidency?
Or was it Willie Brown who got her into her political career, following her "service" to him as his mistress?
One of these things is not like the other. That public education she brags about was a different kind of public education, as I noted here back in 2019:
So now that Harris is presented as a role model and antidote-to-Trump these days, is she going to encourage all the little girls out there by saying that getting a politically strong boyfriend is the way to make it big in politics now? One wonders.
Let's hope she has to answer some questions about it from the Trump camp in what's sure to be a pious and hectoring political campaign.
Let's hope that's not what she means by the public education she so touts to others.
She's a walking, talking example of what not to do, and if anything, the sorry effects of a deficient public education. She's all in for it and now offers herself as a poster girl for it. One, two, many Kamalas...
Let's hope not.
