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The Way Ahead
Mwandikaji K. Mwanafunzi
Educating Us.
Since the late 1960’s some black organizations have advocated desegregation through community control – i.e. blacks managing the schools of our community. Black controlled schools have achieved superior results in public school experiments during the late 1960’s and selected private school efforts from that time through the present.
The New York City Decentralization of the last decades of the 20th century, however, was not community control. It was a watered down compromise designed to fail, providing the illusion of community control in an actual environment of miniscule power. Decentralized school boards could not even remove teachers who taught poorly.
More recently, in Albany, NY, where most public school students are black, a majority black school board voted to set a deadline for ending the “achievement gap” between black and white students. In the board election that followed, former white allies on and off of the board joined with white enemies to oust the black school board president. Apparently the whites feared that resources would be diverted from their children’s schools to bolster schools serving black students.
Given the white power structure’s staunch resistance to potent black community control of education, what we can control with less interference at this point in history is the value system within our families. We need to reorient black family culture so that education becomes a core value.
This has been done. I was raised in a housing project apartment where books were stored on shelves at floor level. As a toddler in the 1950’s, I saw and touched books almost involuntarily. When I was in third grade, my father sat as enforcer at the kitchen table while I completed those tortuous homework assignments of adding columns of three-place numbers. My mother quoted Longfellow and Shakespeare. After my father attended the 1963 March on Washington, my brother listened to Martin Luther King’s recorded speech ad nausea. In later years, my father, brother, and I argued about the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and world affairs, pressuring each other to back up our arguments with facts verified in newspapers and books.
We excelled in school because we were raised to, not because the public schools we attended were so extraordinary. School was an extension of our intellectual world, not the circumference of it. We always knew that college came after high school and always assumed that we would complete both. As adults, we have master’s degrees.
Similarly, my son learned the alphabet at age two or three, with large cut-out alphabets spread all over the floor. He and I crawled around identifying them. At 2½ years old, his desire to attend pre-school was his motivation to potty train.
Although other black families emphasize learning within their homes, it is so uncommon in black communities that many boys who excel in school when young eventually succumb to peer pressure to de-emphasize education. So we need more black families making education a core value for more kids, so that peers will pressure each other to get “A’s” rather than to get high.
Jewish religious culture emphasizes study of the Torah from a young age. My understanding is that at his Bar Mitzvah, a 13-year old expounds on the Law given through Moses. Imagine pre-teens studying for law exams.
Comparatively, middle school must be light action. No wonder they typically excel. The black church should lead the change of culture in black families. Our toddlers should hear and read more Bible and watch less television. As God-centered core values develop, they should add black classic literature. Nurtured thusly, our offspring will successfully seek education, rather than just having us insist that someone educate them.
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