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 developing skills in reading, writing, and math 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 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 Emeritus
of the National Black United Front (NBUF). Click here
to contact Dr. Worrill.
