Politically Correct Racial Segregation

Lileks was a parent helper at his daughter's school on Friday. This is life in cold, blue (state) Minnesota:

At one point the Hispanic students came by. The Hispanic students are not mainstreamed, but held in special separate classes until third grade, at which point I gather they are magically integrated into all the social relationships that have built up over the three previous years. It really was quite remarkable. The teacher led a line of brown-skinned students through the atrium, and of course they all looked at what we were doing. (“We” at this point included two white kids, an Asian kid, and an African-American kid.) I noted to the other parent: I never thought I’d see the days when schools were racially segregated again.

But that’s progress.

Meanwhile, over in the source-fount of liberty under law, the NYT notes that much the same thing is happening with muslim children:

But the visible differences — the way female teenagers wear the full-length dress and head-covering and the boys wear black robes and skullcaps — play into a ferocious debate about the sense of separateness or readiness to integrate Britain’s estimated 1.8 million Muslims, about 3 percent of the population...

...“Muslim children in this country tend to live separate lives anyhow,” said Mark Halstead, a professor of education at the University of Huddersfield in northern England. “Whether they go to Muslim school does not make much difference to their segregation. They are concentrated in the inner cities. They could be attending a state school that is 90 percent Muslim anyway.”

...but that's progress, no?

Monk