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 by our great ancestor Dr. Jacob Carruthers
several years ago, entitled, �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 ant 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.
|
Sep 2, 2010 - Issue 391
is
published every Thursday
