Harvard university debate team loses to New York prison inmates (2015)
&gt;The three inmates, Carl Snyder, Dyjuan Tatro and Carlos Polanco, were tasked with arguing that public schools should be allowed to turn away students whose parents entered the US illegally.<p>&gt;The inmates impressed the judges by suggesting that if public schools turned the students away, non-governmental organisations or wealthier schools could step in and provide better education to the children in any case.<p>That&#x27;s a weak argument, in my view.<p>The illegal immigrants wouldn&#x27;t be able to afford private education as it is too expensive even for Americans. Non-gov orgs wouldn&#x27;t be able to reach to illegal immigrants. Home- and Internet-schooling would be better arguments, but still bad.<p>Integrating the children of illegal immigrants into public schooling would bring greater benefits not only to them and their parents but to society as a whole.<p><i>One can argue that, in the US, European cultural values predominate (&quot;white&quot; is not a synonym for the Caucasian ethnicity but simply an identity that means &quot;holds European cultural values&quot;), and that African-Americans don&#x27;t have significantly different cultural values from European culture, (ie, they are &quot;white&quot; save for superficial differences like music, food and places of worship, and so on), and that a Syrian Caucasian is not &quot;white&quot; (because they don&#x27;t hold European cultural values) but an African-American descendant of the people from the Sahara region is a dark-skinned &quot;white&quot;.</i><p>And therefore African-Americans being dark-skinned &quot;whites&quot; (even if they try to superficially distinguish themselves with the US &quot;black&quot; cultural identity) is an example of the power of assimilation of our public schooling. It would convert, say, a child of Syrian parents with Middle-Eastern values into someone who holds European cultural values and who would work, or rebel, within the cultural rules of the European system.<p>The children of illegal immigrants should be allowed into public schools not just to neutralize the threat of cultural invaders, but to give us more soft power over a wider portion of the world.<p>Discuss? ;)