Interesting (unposted) N&R interview with new Bennett College president and liberal commentator Julianne Malveaux.

Malveaux gives her impressions of Greensboro:

It’s Southern, and I’ve never lived in the South before except for a disasterous chapter in my childhood, which we won’t talk about. (I was in Northern Mississippi for a year.) It’s a smaller place than Washington, San Francisco, New York, which is where I’ve spent much of my life. But it’s friendly. I’ve had wonderful interactions with people. It’s beautiful. I love trees.

But Malveux’s comments on the state of lower education in the U.S. are even more interesting:

I am really concerned about what we are doing about K-12 education. The fact that our nation has chosen to spend less money on education while other countries are spending more is frightening to me. China, India and Eastern Europe are producing more engineers than the United States. Why is that? Because they are choosing to invest in education and we are not……If you look at 1958 and 1959, when we were in a space war, we literally dumped billions of dollars into education…..

Something shifted somewhere between 1980 and 1988 where it somehow became not the community responsibility to create education but a personal responsibility. Those words “personal responsibility” are pernicious words when you look at living in a community.

You get what you spend. You reap what you sow. If you plant education, you get educated people. If you plant bombs, you get a war.

I haven’t been able to find numbers on education spending in the 1950s, but I’ll assume Dr. Malveaux is adjusting for inflation when she says we were dumping “billions” into education. Whatever, because the bottom line is we’re still dumping billions into education, with very mixed results.

It baffles me that an intelligent woman like Dr. Malveaux would spread one of the biggest myths about education in the U.S. Then again, she’s now in the money-for-education business. Big time.