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CONTENTS Page Foreword
to the Third Printing 1 Our
Children are Our Hope and Our Future 3 Education:
The Great Obsession 11 Essential
Ingredients of a New System of Education 33 Education
to Govern: A Program for Learning Now 38 Circles
of Continuing Development Back
Cover Since then, the situation in
the United States has gone from bad to worse.
Not only our schools but the government and the economy are in a state
of continuing crisis. Moral
deterioration and social irresponsibility in every sphere of American life make
daily existence a nightmare for everyone in this country - be they young or old,
rich or poor, black, brown or white, male or female. The Watergate scandals have made it unmistakably clear that those
who are the products of the nation's "best schools" have not been
educated to govern. When the Community Control.
of Schools movement was launched by the black movement in the late 60s, the
leaders of the movement recognized the need to redefine the function of
education in order to make it responsive and accountable to the community. However, those involved in the movement did
not make a fundamental historical and philosophical analysis of why our schools
have so failed the American people. If
they had, they might have recognized that the educational system in this
country, like the American capitalist system of which it is an integral part,
operates against the interests of the community - precisely because it
encourages the ambitious individual to climb the economic and social ladder out
of the community. Instead, black militants
assumed that merely changing the color of those in charge of the schools would
automatically bring about a fundamental change in the schools. The result is that in the
last few years it has been relatively easy for the system to promote blacks
into high positions to play the same role against the black community as Meanwhile, our schools have
become little more than custodial institutions for our children. What, then, should be the
purpose of education today? What are
the essential ingredients of a new system of education ? How long are we going
to allow our children to be destroyed by an outmoded school system because we
are not willing to carry on the theoretical and practical struggles necessary
to create a new philosophy and practice of education suitable to our day and
age? Ask yourself these questions
as you read this pamphlet which is even more important today than when it was
originally published. August, 1974 Some people judge the quality
of black education and the progress of black people by these most superficial
symbols. However, the real extent of
black education must be judged by examining what is actually taking place in
these schools. The schools in black
communities often resemble red light districts and sometimes even baby-sitting
compounds more than they do centers for learning. In the halls and corridors some students are passing narcotics of
various kinds to one another; others are singing and dancing to the latest top ten
tunes on the "Soul" charts.
Straws, purchased or stolen from the cafeterias, serve for the snorting
or Administrators, teachers and
parents used to worry about the high rate of drop-outs. Now the problem is the large number of
drop-ins. Drop-ins are drop-outs or
former graduates who return to the school, usually through an open rear door or
a door unlocked by a student accomplice, in order to sell drugs, to extort
money from students, to recruit potential prostitutes, to break into student
lockers, and to sell or purchase the "hot" goods which generally come
from breaking and entering neighborhood homes and/or shoplifting in downtown
department stores. Regular police departments
are no longer capable of handling or halting the robberies, selling of stolen
goods, criminal assaults, vandalism, peddling of drugs, and pimping which have
become as much a part of normal inner city school life as the classes
themselves. So, in an attempt to cope
with the deteriorating situation, Boards of Education have hired a
plainclothes, sometimes undercover, security force. However, under the supervision of the present administrators, the
primary target of this security force has become students engaged in political
activity. The administrators' expressed
concern for the safety of students has become merely a camouflage for their
real concern: the halting of militant struggles against the outmoded and
bankrupt educational system in which they have such a huge vested interest. Under these circumstances,
many parents feel as if they are sending their children off to war instead of
to learn. Teachers also feel themselves
surrounded by hostile forces; they live in fear of the communities they are
supposed to be serving. Their
"student pets" are the only links between them and the community. Most teachers have no
understanding of the historical role which education has played and continues
to play in American society. They have
not the slightest notion or even concern as to the purpose which education should
play at this stage in human development.
Their interest in the students is like that of the canner in a cannery;
their sole motivation for coming to school is their bi-weekly paychecks. Very few school
administrators and teachers ever ask themselves why they are doing what they
are doing. This inability or refusal to
raise fundamental questions about the purpose of American education is
destroying our children. As a result,
many students are increasingly turning to pool room "rappers" or
street corner philosophers for leadership. Obviously this is a critical
situation. What is so critical is not
only the corruption and deterioration that have overtaken black youth since the
urban rebellions began in 1964, but the fact that black youth are losing any
desire to learn. In the most vigorous
and resourceful of our youth, those between the ages of 10 to 20, the will and
incentive to learn are fast dwindling.
The inability to envisage any meaningful future has so demoralized our
young people that even sonic, of the
brightest among them view "revolutionary suicide" (the slogan of the
Black Panther Party) as viable alternative.
As if suicide of any kind provided meaningful alternative! Ironically, the educational
system - which in 1970 consumed over U billion dollars, involved over 45, 000,
000 persons and has been, charged with the responsibility of motivating and
preparing the country’s youth for the future is the institution primarily
responsible for the mental and spiritual degeneration and demoralization of
young people. The picture printed is
horrible, but not nearly as horrible is the reality. And each day that we hesitate to face this reality and to begin
the struggle for meaningful change only means the destruction of increasing
numbers of our youth. We realize that
the struggle for a new educational system, a system that meets the needs of the
times in which we live, will neither be easy nor quick. But the first prerequisite for such a
struggle is a willingness to face the reality, ugly as it is, and the
destruction of any The present U. S.
educational system cannot be patched up. it is already much too late for such
band-aids as MORE NIONEY, or MORE POLICE, or MORE SCHOOLS, or MORE PATIENT
INVOLVEMENT, or MORE TEACHERS or MORE TIAIE IN SCHOOL! Struggles around these inadequate and
piecemeal solutions can only produce more demoralization, more despair, and
more destruction of our young people.
At this stage, militant struggles without a vision of the
educational goals we are trying to achieve and without concrete programs can
only lead to more frustration. Before we propose a program
for getting out of this situation, we must examine the history of its
development. The most recent period of black
struggle in education began with the Supreme Court decision of 1954 which
declared that segregated schools were unequal.
Following this decision, most black parents thought that integration was
the panacea which would provide equal opportunity and quality education for
their children. However, the
continuation of de facto segregation, the physical struggles in those few cases
where black and white students were thrown together, and the increasing
realization (through contact) that whites too were getting a worthless
education, have forced black parents and the black community to realize that
merely seating black and white students next to each other is not the answer- With their faith in
integration dampened, blacks began to seek new directions. They demanded the hiring of more
administrators and black teachers and the inclusion of black history in the
school curriculum. The positive fruits from
these demands were meager. Most black
history classes consisted of little more than the listing of black personalities. No real attempt was made to distinguish
between reactionary and progressive black figures or to provide black students
(or any other students for that matter) with an understanding of the historical
development of and the organic relationship between racism and capitalism in
the United States. The next stage in the
evolutionary process of the black struggle for quality education was the demand
for "Black Finally a compromise called
"Decentralization" was worked out by Ford Foundation's McGeorge
Bundy. Formerly one of the grand
manipulators of U. S. foreign policy, Bundy introduce into the schools struggle
the same tactic that the U. S. has been employing in Africa, Latin America and
Asia. The Blacks, like the oppressed
people in the former colonies, were to be appeased with the facade of power. Decentralization is in fact a form of
domestic neocolonialism by which blacks are given the illusion of power through
local governing boards, while the real power remains in the hands of the
white-dominated central administrations. There is no use in our
complaining about this scheme by the power structure. What it is doing is only what should be expected of it. On the other hand, we do have a right to
demand more of those who are leading the struggle to take power away from the
educational establishment. When one raises the question
of power, one incurs the obligation and responsibility of putting forward a
program which makes clear what one would do with that power. Up to now, although blacks have complained
bitterly and justifiably about the outmoded educational system, we have not 'Bible there have been
important external barriers to the success of 201, a final most significant
internal barrier must be acknowledged, It lies in the fact that the
demonstration district, its personnel, its parents, and its supporters pursued
their task without ideology, without a sense of history, without established
models, and with little experience at institution building, The zeal and
commitment of the educational rebels, while productive, has not completely
overcome their own lack of experience and the amoral pragmatism of the present
order. . .. "Finally the lack of an
ideology means that the educational rebels are not a serious threat to the
status quo. Rebels without a point of
view will be arrested at the level of curriculum change, black studies for
white studies, for example, They will be left unable to pursue more distant
goals of change, such as the education and liberation of the Black and Puerto
Rican students who now demand the creative and human capacity of teachers in a
healthy, productive education environment, 11 We of the All-African
People's Union recognize the extent and complexity of the crisis in
education. But we have not been
overwhelmed by its complexity nor have we succumbed to the "Survival"
panic which now has the black community in its insidious 0'rip. We are convinced that black people in this
country can have a future - but only if they struggle to create and control
that future. We believe that if blacks
utilize their historically-conditioned strategic position - in the heart of the
United States' largest cities to organize escalating programs of struggle, we
can ultimately achieve state power and build a new social order - based on the
concept of MAN as the center of the universe and taking full advantage of the
unprecedented technology which the United States has achieved. On this basis we have
decided, to begin with, that "THE CITY IS THE BLACK MANS LAND"
because most of this country's largest cities are dominated, population-wise,
by blacks. Blacks are the only ones who
can solve the crisis of U.S. cities.
Blacks have the greatest need to solve the We recognize that the
struggle will not be easy. We know that
our program will not be like and will indeed be fought by two million
administrators and teachers, tens of millions of blue and white collar workers
and] their unions determined to keep kids in school and off the job market,
millions of construction workers and building contractors, hundreds of book
publishers and instructional equipment manufacturers. But they are not out- chief concern. Our concern is for the millions of children, born and yet unborn,
not only black but of all races, whose spirits, minds and lives will be
destroyed if we do not struggle and if we do not win. In particular, we are determined not to allow the masses of black
and other youth of color to be demoralized and robbed of their human
essence. The human condition is our
major concern. We are black but we know and
want to know about things other than blackness. We are concerned with the long historical process through which
the human species has struggled to expand its productive capabilities (work,
labor and technology) and its political and social responsibilities,
Consequently, we have taken the lessons acquired from the last sixteen years of
struggle by black people for humane, meaningful and quality education and
developed the EDUCATION FOR THE PURPOSE OF GOVERNING PROGRAM. During these same sixteen
years, in order to combat the devastating destructiveness of the educational
system, black people have engaged in many programs of struggle, basically
directed towards ridding the schools of racism and obtaining "quality
education" for black children.
However, all these programs have had the aim of improving the system as
it presently exists, Consequently, they were bound to fail because the present
educational system was organized We recognize that neither
this nor any other program is a finished Product good for all time, and that it
(like any other program) will be enriched and expanded by the living necessary
to transform ideas into reality. But we
Maintain that any program which attempts to meet the needs of the present stage
of United States society must be based upon the philosophy and ideology
contained in this pamphlet, a philosophy and ideology which instill in students
a purpose and a reason for learning NOW. April, 1971 In the present struggle for
a new system of education to fulfill this pressing need, the black community
constitutes the decisive social force because it is the black community which
the present educational system has most decisively failed. Russian, or Spanish. Like other administration
programs, Allen's is of course a pacification program, aimed at cooling the complaints
of personnel managers who are obsessed by the apparent inability of job
applicants to fill out employment forms; high school and college instructors
who tear out their hair over student errors in spelling and punctuation; and
the great majority of Americans, many vocal black parents, who are still naive
enough to believe that if black children could only read they could get better
jobs and stop roaming the streets. Since these professional
educators are the chief beneficiaries, they are naturally the chief propagators
of certain myths about education, which are unfortunately shared by most
Americans. Chief among these are the
myths (1) that the fundamental purpose of education in an age of abundance is
to increase earning power; (2) that the achievement level of children can be,
defined and measured by their response to words on a printed The rebellions in secondary
schools and colleges during the past few years are a sign that young people,
black and white, have already begun to reject these myths. Seventy-five percent of secondary schools
have already experienced these rebellions to one degree or another. During the next ten years the struggle to
destroy these myths root and branch will continue to escalate. In the black community the struggle will
probably take place under the general umbrella of the struggle for community
control of schools. In the white community it will probably be around issues of
student rights to freedom of dress, speech, assembly, and press. But whatever the focus, any educators, black
or white, professional or paraprofessional, who continue to try to run the
schools by these myths, will find themselves increasingly resorting to force
and violence and/or drugs like Ritalin to keep youth quiet in school and/or to
keep so-called troublemakers and trouble out.
The odds are now overwhelming that the American equivalent of Hitler's
gas ovens and storm troopers will appear first on school and university
campuses. The above myths represent
the attempt of the public school system to adjust to the changing needs of the
American capitalist system over the past 50 years. Because the present school system is so huge and so resistant to
change, we tend to think that it has existed forever. Actually it is only about two generations old. In nineteenth-century America (and in
Western Europe until the end of the Second World War), the school system was
organized to prepare the children of the wellborn and well-to-do to govern over
the less well-born and not so well-to-do.
Thus, at the turn of the century only 6 percent of U.S. youth graduated
from high school. To accomplish this objective
the schools were organized: (1) To give the children of
workers elementary skills in the three Rs which would enable
them to function as workers in an industrial society. As: American History, American Technology, the American Free
Enterprise System, and American Democracy. (3) To provide a
smoothly functioning sifting-mechanism whereby, as Cohn Green has phrased it,
the "winners" could automatically be sorted from the "losers";*
that is to say, whereby those individuals equipped by family background and
personality to finish high school and go on to college could be selected out
from among the great majority on their way to the labor market after a few
years of elementary school, or at most a year or so of high school. This automatic separator
worked quite well during the first half of this century. It was acceptable to the European immigrants
whose children constituted the core of the urban school population and who, in appreciation
for the opportunity to come to the Land of Opportunism, felt the responsibility
was theirs to become integrated or
assimilated into the American Way of Life. Proceeding from this
premise, working-class children from Eastern and Southern European stock (the
"loser-s") dropped out of school quietly around the age of 14 or 15,
while the exceptions or "winners," usually those from WASP or
Northern European stock, finished high school in preparation for college, which
would qualify them to become doctors or lawyers or engineers or teachers. The high-school curriculum and staff were
set up on the basis of this implicit stratification. With such elite, Thus in 1911 only 11 percent
of the high-school-age population was in school, in 1920 only 20 percent. Not until 1930 did the number reach the
relatively mass proportion of 51 percent. (James Coleman, Adolescents and the Schools, New York, 1965.) During the 30s, with the shrinking
of the unskilled and child labor market, some kinks began to develop in this
automatic sorting mechanism. But these
were ironed out temporarily when the high schools expanded their skills
curriculum to meet the needs of an increasingly technical society, including
such subjects as typing and shop and simultaneously putting greater emphasis on
basketball and football in which the children of workers could excel and
develop enough sense of belonging not to upset the applecart. By 1940, 73 percent of
high-school-age youngsters, hopeful of gaining higher skills and thus escaping
the back-breaking insecure jobs of their blue-collar parents, were attending
high school. Those who dropped out
before graduation-which for the last 30 years has averaged approximately
one-half of all those entering ninth grade and at least two-thirds of black
youth-could, if they were white, still find such useful jobs as delivery or
stock boys, or helpers of various kinds in the many small businesses which
still existed, thus adding to the family income. Or they could just make themselves useful around the house doing
the chores not yet outmoded by labor-saving devices. During the war years, with a maximum of twelve million Americans
in the armed services, there were jobs aplenty for their younger brothers and
sisters. It was not until after the
Second World War, and particularly in the 50s and 60s, that the American school
system began to find itself in deep trouble.
The Andy Hardy world of the 30s was disappearing. Mechanization of agriculture and wartime
work had brought millions of families to the cities from the farms and from the
South-including blacks and Appala- What now should be done with
these "loser-s"? The obvious
solution was to keep them in school.
Thus, instead of the high schools acting as automatic sifters to sort
out the "losers," they were turned into mass custodial institutions
to keep everyone in the classroom and off the streets. If at the same time some could also be
trained for white-collar jobs, that was a fringe benefit. For the great majority in the high schools,
skills training played the same supplementary role that it. plays in a juvenile
detention home. By 1960, 90 percent of
high-school-age youngsters were attending school. From a relatively elite institution for the college bound, the
high school has been transformed within 40 years into a mass detention
home. The ideal teacher is no longer
the college-entrance-exam-oriented pedagogue but the counselor type who can
persuade the average youngster to adjust to this detention or the tough
authoritarian who can force it down his throat. Since "winners" and "losers" are expected to
stay in school until graduation, the high school diploma is no longer a sign of
academic achievement but of the youngster's seatwarming endurance over a
12-year period. The success of the
public school system itself is now measured in terms of its efficiency in
persuading or compelling youth to extend their schooling indefinitely; if
possible not only through high school but on to junior college, with each
higher institution acting as a remedial program for the lower. Meanwhile, to sell the
public on the new custodial role of the schools, the myths of education as the
magic weapon to open all doors, particularly the door to higher earnings and
unlimited consumption, and of the schools as the only place to get an education,
have been propagated. Extended
schooling has been made into an American obsession. As a number of observers The internal contradiction
between the traditional separator and the new mass custodial roles assigned to
the schools was bound to lead to conflict and disintegration: and this, in
fact, is what has been taking place over the past twenty years. The black revolt has only brought out into
the open and given focus to the mushrooming tensions between elite and average
students, and between students and teachers, which first manifested themselves
on a city-wide scale in the New York City strike of predominantly white high
school students in 1950. No one knows
these tensions better than the school teachers and administrators, white and
black. But because they have a vested
interest in the system, they have for the most part been willing to settle for
higher (i.e., combat) pay and better working conditions, such as smaller
classes and more preparation time.
Teacher organizations to achieve these demands have to some extent met
the economic or class needs of teachers as workers. But the more teachers have gained as -,Yorkers the less they have
felt inclined to expose the bankruptcy of the educational system and to make
fundamental proposals for its reorganization.
They have made the fatal mistake of confusing their role as a special
kind of worker engaged in the process of developing human beings with the role
of production workers engaged in the process of producing inanimate goods. It has thus been left to the
black community to expose the fundamental contradictions within the system. Prior to the Second World
War black youth had been concentrated in the South, not only separate and
unequal but prac- Accepting at face value the
myths about education, black parents began to turn their attention to the
schools, only to discover that instead of being places of learning, the schools
had become baby-sitting institutions in which their children had been socially
promoted year after year, regardless of achievement levels as determined by the
schools' own tests. When school administrators
and teachers were challenged to explain this situation, they tried to explain
away their own failure by shifting the blame to black children. Hence the theories of the "culturally
deprived" and "culturally disadvantaged" child which have been
masquerading as sociological theory since the 50s. In effect, these educators were saying: "There is nothing
wrong with the system; only the wrong children have shown up." Through
these alibis the professionals not only hoped to divert the attack back to the
black community; they also hoped to hustle more money for themselves in the
form of compensatory, remedial, more effective school programs. But the defense has
boomeranged. Forced to defend
themselves and their children against the thinly disguised racism of During the next 5 to 15
years the black community will also be redefining education for this day, this age, and this country. The overwhelming majority of black students who are not
succeeding in the present school system Estimated by New York teachers union
President Albert Shanker at 85 percent) have in fact rejected a used, outmoded,
useless school system. Over the past ten years literally
billions of dollars have been injected into the schools all over the country-even
more than has gone into the moon race-in an attempt to make the system
work. In New York City alone the school
budget was raised 200 percent until it is now more than one billion dollars a year,
or one-third of the entire city budget.
The New York teacher-pupil ration was lowered to an average of 1: 17;
$70 million of Title I money was poured into the organization of 2,000
innovative projects; experts from the twelve colleges in the area were
consulted and consulted; money was spent like water; book publishers, project
directors, educational consultants 'ne black community cannot
afford to be wasting time fighting for reforms that have already proved
worthless. Every week, every month,
every year that we waste means that more black children are being, wasted. We must reject the racist myth that by
keeping kids in school an extra day, an extra week, an extra month, we are
giving them a chance to learn a little something or helping to keep them out of
mischief. Not only are they not
learning in the schools, but the schools in the black community today are
little more than mass penal institutions, breeding the same kind of vice and
crime that mass penal institutions breed, making the average child an easy prey
for the most hardened elements. Day
after day, year after year, the will and incentive to learn, which are
essential to the continued program and future development of any people, are
being systematically destroyed in millions of black youth, perhaps the most
vigorous and resourceful of those between the ages of 10 and 20. The key to the new system of
education that is the objective of the black movement for community control of
schools is contained in the position paper of the Five-State Organizing
Committee which was formed at a conference at Harvard University in January
1968. At this conference the black
educators and community representatives agreed that "the function of education
must be redefined to make it responsive and accountable to the community." The schools today are in the
black community but not of it. They
are not responsive or accountable to it.
If anything they are an enemy force, a Trojan Horse, within it. The teaching and administrative staff come
from outside the community, bringing with them the missionary attitude that
they are bearing culture to backward natives-when in fact, like missionaries,
they are living off the natives. The
subject matter of the schools, beginning with the information about the
policeman and the fireman given to first and second graders is alien to the
lives of The overwhelming majority of
black youth see no relationship between this type of education and their daily
lives in the Not having the drive to
succeed in the man's world at all costs, which is characteristic of the
ambitious opportunist, and much more sensitive to what is going on around them,
they reject the perspective of interminable schooling without practice or
application, which is now built into the educational system. Besieged on all sides by commercials urging
them to consume without limit and conscious at the same time of the limitless
productivity of American technology, they have abandoned the Protestant ethic
of work and thrift. So they roam the
streets, aimlessly and restlessly, everyone a potential victim of organized
crime and a potential hustler against his own community. (1) The individualist,
opportunist orientation of American education has
been ruinous to the American community, most obviously, of course, to the black
community. In the classroom over the
years it isolates children from one another, stifling their (3) Learning, especially in this
age of rapid social and technical change, is not something you can make people
do in their heads with the perspective that years from now, eventually, they
will be able to use what they have stored up.
By the time you are supposed to use it, it has really become "used."
The natural relationship between theory and practice has been turning upside
down in the schools, in order to keep kids off the labor market. The natural way to learn is to be interested
first and then to develop the skill
to pursue your interest. As John Holt
has written in How Children Learn, "
The sensible way, the best way, is to start with something worth doing, and
then, moved by a strong desire to do it, get whatever skills are needed." A human being, young or old,
is not a warehouse of information or
skills, and an educational system which treats children like warehouses is not
only depriving them of education but crippling their natural capacity to
learn. Particularly in a world of
rapidly changing information and skills, learning
how to learn is more important than
learning specific skills and facts. A
human being cannot develop only as a consumer.
Depriving children of the opportunity to carry on productive activity is
also depriving them of the opportunity to develop the instinct for workmanship
which has made it possible for man to advance through the ages. The
experience of performance is necessary
to learning. Only through doing things
and evaluating (4) Finally, you cannot deprive young people of the rights of social
responsibility, and social consciousness, and the ability to judge social
issues during the many years they are supposed to attend school and then expect
them suddenly to be able to exercise these essential rights when they become
adult. Our children are not
learning because the present system is depriving them of such natural stimuli
to learning as exercising their resourcefulness to solve the real problems of
their own communities; working together rather than competitively, with younger
children emulating older ones and older children teaching younger ones;
experiencing the intrinsic consequences of their own actions; judging
issues. It is because the present system wastes these natural human
incentives to learning that its demands on the taxpayer are constantly
escalating. It is because those who
have succeeded under the present system have ended up as such dehumanized
beings-technicians and mandarins who are ready to provide so-called objective
skills and information to those in power (Eichmanns)-that students are in
revolt on secondary and college campuses. Instead of schools serving
to drain selected opportunists out of the community, they must be functionally
reorganized to become centers of the community. This involves much, much more than the use of school facilities
for community needs although this should certainly be expanded. In order for the schools to become the
center of the community, the community |
