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 a 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 by our great ancestor Dr. Jacob Carruthers several
years ago, 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
ourselves!”
BlackCommentator.com Columnist, Conrad W. Worrill, PhD, is the National
Chairman of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here
to contact Dr. Worrill. |
