Throughout
most of our lives, African people in America have been
told if you get a good education you can get a good job. African
people in Africa were told something similar.
If you get a good education your condition in life will improve.
In
the early part of the twentieth-century until the late 1960s and
early 1970s, the thrust was to encourage
African people in America to at least
get a high school diploma so that they could be eligible for a job
in a significant segment of the work force.
The
explosion of the 1960s Civil Rights and Black Power Movements forced
colleges and universities to admit Africans in America
to their predominately white colleges and universities in large
numbers.
Today, African people in America are encouraged to get college education
so they can get a good job. The education market has been saturated
to the extent that a high school diploma of the 1930s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, in most instances,
has the same meaning as a college degree today.
That
meaning is one of a college degree qualifying people for entry-level
jobs in the U.S. labor market,
except for those instances where people have been trained in specialized
fields at the undergraduate level.
What
we hear repeatedly today is that we must concentrate on African
people in America reading, writing, and math skills at the elementary and secondary levels so they can
compete for the jobs that will be available in U. S. multinational
corporations in the twenty-first-century,
driven by the world of technology and computers.
 Many
of our ancestors in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth-centuries, who were concerned with the issue of education, asked the question - education for what? It is quite clear that the
major direction of U. S. educational policy has been to train and
educate African people to work for white people. That is, to teach them to read, write, and compute, so they will be prepared to
work for us.
In
a paper written years ago by our great ancestor Dr. Jacob Carruthers,
titled, “Black Intellectuals and The Crisis In Black Education,”
he observed, “When the chattel slave system
was destroyed by the Civil War, one of
the first acts of the victors was to provide for Black schooling
on a wide scale. The northern industrialists through their philanthropic
alter egos began finding and establishing Black colleges. These
colleges were intended to sit atop a Negro education system.”
Further
Dr. Carruthers wrote, “By the turn of
the century, even southern whites were making use of this Negro education system
to facilitate the transition from the old chattel to a new,  but
equally effective, system of Black exploitation.”
Carruthers
explains, “The new system depended upon the cultivation of a Black elite to
serve as examples for the masses of Blacks and to demonstrate the
rewards of obedience.”
The
educated Black elite, Carruthers points out, “demonstrated time
and time again their ability to do what they had been trained to
do. Eventually, a few of them were invited
to manage the segregated colleges that were established to train
Black teachers. In this manner, a small, educated Negro elite became overseers of the educational affairs of
millions of Black people.”
This
model of education, that continues today, was established by
so-called leading white educators in this country who met at Lake Mohonk, New
York (a resort area) on June 4-6, 1890, and June 3-5, 1891 to read and discuss papers
on what they officially called the “Negro Question.”
Again, Dr. Carruthers writes that at the end of the second conference “they
had decided that the primary things that Blacks had to be taught
were morality and the dignity of labor (i.e. working for white folks).”
African
people in the United States have a rich tradition of leaders
who have taken issue with the white conceptualization of the mission
of education of African people in America.
David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, Henry McNeal Turner, Martin R. Delany,
and Edward Wilmot Blyden were nineteenth-century advocates that
the education of African people should be designed to assist
us in doing for ourselves.
In
the twentieth-century, leaders such as Marcus Garvey, Carter G. Woodson, Elijah Muhammad,
and Malcolm X, all spoke and wrote consistently about the need for African people
to develop an education program aimed at developing African people
“to do for self.”
 In
other words, we are still challenged today to create an education climate that
inspires African youth in America to understand that the purpose of education
is to develop the skills and historical understanding of the past
as it relates to the present and future in preparation for working
for self and the liberation of African people. This is the challenge
of the twenty-first-century - to defeat the one hundred year tradition
established by white educational leaders who created curricula for
Africans in America designed to prepare
them to work for white folks.
Our
esteemed ancestor, Dr. John Henrik Clarke reminded us repeatedly, that, “history is the clock that people
use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is also
a clock that they use to find themselves on the map of human geography.
 The
role of history in the final analysis is to tell a people where
they have been and what they have been,
where they are and what they are. Most importantly,
the role of history is to tell a people where they still must go
and what they still must be. To me the relationship of a people
to their history is the same as the relationship of a child to its
mother.” The purpose of education must always be “for us to
do for self!”
BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National
Chairman of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here
to contact Dr. Worrill. |
