Besides enriching themselves, America’s leadership class has failed at everything, including their promises to educate young people.
In a pair of viral videos posted on the social media platform TikTok, students at Philadelphia’s Preparatory Charter School of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Careers — one of Pennsylvania’s “most diverse schools,” per the New York Post — struggled either to read a simple sentence or to make sense of it in their own words.
The first video, posted by TikTok user “whatthevek,” featured students who could not read the following sentence: “She wore a silhouette of clothes that were extraordinary but somewhat gauche.”
All five students stumbled on the words “silhouette,” “extraordinary,” and “gauche.”
WARNING: The following videos contain profane language and may be offensive to some viewers.
@whatthevek Should I Do a Part 2? #fyp #viral #funny #highschool #read ♬ Satie Gymnopedie No. 1 Healing(980355) – Tani Taka
Then, in a second video, a different group of students read a different sentence.
This time, most of them correctly read, “The colonel asked the choir to accommodate the governor’s schedule.” When prompted to put that sentence into their own words, however, they could not do so.
@whatthevek It’s kernel lol #whatthevek #funny #viral #philly #highschool ♬ sonido original – Música_Clásica
As a former educator, three things about this story infuriate me.
First, it makes my blood boil to think that someone might view those videos and then mock the students.
Watch the young man at the end of the first video above. Does he not come across as ashamed and hiding his embarrassment behind nervous movements? Adults failed him and his classmates.
Second, according to the New York Post, “whatthevek” later wrote on Instagram that he would not share a third video because he had received threats from the powers that be at his school.
“I would post a part three, but the school board is trying to expel me, stop me from going to prom, and stop me from walking at graduation. I don’t know chat,” he wrote on Friday.
In other words, some of the adults who failed those students want to punish the one who exposed their failure.
Finally, it did not have to be this way.
On March 17, 1780, future president John Adams instructed his son, John Quincy Adams, to focus on Latin and Greek studies.
“I hope soon to hear that you are in Virgil and Tully’s orations, or Ovid or Horace or all of them,” the elder Adams wrote.
John Quincy Adams was 12.
The point, of course, is that youth has nothing to do with those Philadelphia students’ struggles.
Parents, of course, constitute the first line of defense against low expectations for their children.
At the macro level, however, America’s leaders seem uninterested in mundane matters like the quality of Americans’ neighborhoods or whether they can afford to raise families in the first place, let alone whether their children can read.
Like the school administrators in Philadelphia, those leaders would rather punish people who expose their failures. The kids in those videos deserve better.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
