Melissa Prunty Kemp

It is no secret that America is facing an education crisis.  Our schools suffer from the insurgence of violence, drugs, apathy on the part of teachers and students, lack of vision, government take-over and quite possibly, the voucher-select-your-own-school programs.  Inside the classroom, large numbers of our black students--black males in particular--are being removed into the concentration camps of special education, alternative education or detention, suspension and expulsion. 

What is worse: each year our nation’s colleges and universities produce hundreds of  BA’s, MA’s and PhD’s.  Yet with all these educated people, the African American community is not reaping the benefits: decolonization of our minds.  We aren’t educating our own children.  We allow the oppressor to do it instead, a fact which guarantees that we as a people will remain “miseducated,” ground up in the public school machine.      

Carter G Woodson, African American father of modern black history, clearly defined what was then, and what still remains today, one of the most daunting obstacles to our collective freedom: obtaining a truthful, full, intellectually challenging education.  Woodson states that, “the mere imparting of information is not education.  Above all things, the effort must result in making a [hu]man think and do for himself just as the Jews have done in spite of universal persecution”¹  If we spend millions of dollars in the nation’s colleges and universities, shouldn’t we expect that our intellectual preparations would allow us to empower ourselves and our communities? How often would any of us give up fifty thousand dollars and get nothing for it?      

Woodson further writes that “it may be of no importance to the race to be able to boast today of many times as many ‘educated’ members as it had in 1865 [or 1996 for that matter].  If they are of the wrong kind, the increase in numbers will be a disadvantage rather than an advantage.  The only question which conerns us here is whether  these ‘ educated ’ persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor”².   

The timelessness of Woodson’s words attests to the fact that with the substantial increase in degreed African American persons, we as a people have seen little in the way of true liberation from our oppressor.  By now among other advances, we should have multitudes of African-centered schools run by parents and African American teachers and administrators, funded by the African American community, and supported by any other human beings truly down with the cause.  Why don’t we have this?  Where are those African American college graduates to teach our children?  Why can’t we see that the teacher molds the minds of the world?  If we let the oppressor mold those minds, where will we be?

Today, we are likely to send our children to school and when they have “problems” with their school work, peers, or authority figures, black people allow our oppressor to impose a new form of ghettoization upon us.  We hegemonically allow the oppressor to give our children drugs to correct their scholastic and adjustment problems.  We allow school counselors and social workers to tell us that because our daughters, but primarily our sons, don’t perform well in testing situations, don’t seem interested in learning or are continuous discipline problems, that they are learning disabled, hyperactive or both.  Therefore, we black parents should begin a drug regime for our children as early as four years old and ignore the likelihood that we are predisposing them to more insidious drug abuse in their adult lives, if they grow to that age.

      While there are certainly legitimate cases of attention deficit hyperactive disorder meriting drug usage, and while many of our  children need more attention in the school setting, there can be no doubt that our children, particularly our boys, are targeted for failure and special education by our educational system using a predominantly white, female teaching staff as its agents.  Jawanja Kunjufu, lecturer and best-selling author, has done extensive research on what he calls a “conspiracy to destroy black boys” where he presents convincing evidence that hyperactivity and special education are tools of the oppressor directed against black children.  Theories of hyperactivity, for instance, deal with what should be considered a normal energy level for a child at certain ages.  Whose child(ren) was used to set the standard?  By physiology and by culture, black children have higher energy levels that are expressed differently than what the school system is trying to generate.  It needs model citizen-taxpayers who don’t question much, and are willing to be distracted from the problems, their causes and origins.  As a result, 41% of black children (who make up 17% of the entire school population) are in special education classes.  85% of special education students are black males.  Special education has become a dumping ground for children who are “hyperactive,” have behavior problems or unmet emotional needs, or may not be liked by school authorities according to Kunjufu ³.  

Black people must wake up!  We go to college and study the sociological, psychological, philosophical theories that impact education.  We know the history of those great black thinkers who created educational curriculum and instruction during segregation--Booker T Washington, WEB DuBois, Mary McCleod Bethune.   We must begin to use the hundreds of years of knowledge we collected and history we’ve created to affect real change, to become independent and free.   We can no longer follow a pattern of behavior that Harold Cruse has so aptly described in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual:  everytime the “Negro” gets to a position of being able to empower the race, to suggest and inact proactive change, we fail to make the necessary leap in our thinking and our actions.  Cruse writes that “the more practical sides of the Negro problem in America are bogged down organizationally and methodologically precisely because of cultural confusion and disorientation on the part of most Negroes.  Thus it is only through a cultural analysis of the Negro approach to group ‘politics’ that the errors, weaknesses and goal-failures can cogently be analyzed and positively worked out”⁴.   It was Cruse’s primary contention that blacks as a group were being constantly thwarted by various political and ethnic groups, the Communist Party, Democrats and Jews among others during Cruse’s time.  Because of the courting of these groups, blacks more often than not have failed to take up the necessary agendas that would promote our community.  What was true for Cruse in 1964 remains true in large measure today, especially in our thinking on education. 

      African Americans need to become aware that we have a problem and a historically, culturally constructed means with which to solve it in our hands. We even have a recent history on which to base our future efforts.  Our elders demonstrated that African-American taught, African centered and populated schools had the capacity to provide exceptional educations to African-American children; they produced the Martin Luther Kings, Malcolm X’s, Huey Newtons and Angela Davis’ of the world.  If this history is not recent enough, CBS NEWS (March 18, 1996 evening edition) reported on the marked success of predominantly black, single-sexed classrooms taught by predominantly black teachers in New Jersey.  Unfortunately, an un-conscious black school superintendent put an end to this positive and successful experiment on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and promoted discrimination⁵.  

We lose our children’s minds to deception and weakening because we don’t recognize how  much could be gained by African American creation of a culturally connected, receptive learning environment for our children. Social constructivist thinkers like L. Vygosky (trans, 1990) and Jay Bruner (1986) have demonstrated that it is the collective social unit that has the greatest impact on an individual’s construction of language, selfhood and world view.  If we accept this premise, it only follows that our children would best be educated by people who have the greatest natural access to, and possibly the greatest understanding of,  our culture.   

Am I saying that we should return to the days of “separete but equal”?  That educating our children in segregated classrooms is worth the cost of robbing them of the chance for cultural expansion and exchange that comes with an integrated classroom?  And what about the influence of our black culture upon those with whom our black children interact?  

I am saying that the current educational system has failed us because it fails to truly understand us and our needs as a people.  It consistently refuses to represent us in teaching and professional positions, even in numbers proportionate to the amount of black students in an individual institution.   It does not fully require the development and training of its current and incoming teachers in cultural diversity and multiculturalism.  (By these two terms, I do not mean the connotative definitions which today swirl around the terms in contemporary colleges and universities.)  If the current educational system will not love, nurture and properly educate all  children, we should use what we have to educate them ourselves.  

This does not mean that those of us who become Afrocentric educational activists must claim the labels of reversed racism and radical separatism that will be pinned upon us if we choose to take over the education of our children.  We do not have to hate a particular people because we dislike or distrust some of its systems.  Many would agree that there is generally nothing wrong with assessing a situation to be detrimental, then  taking active, positive steps to change it.  Some instead would call it initiative.  

 

Previously Published in Uhuru Magazine, Kent State University, September 1997