by Asa G. Hilliard III
Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Education
Georgia State University, Atlanta Georgia
American Educational Research
Association Plenary Presentation
Commission on Research in Black Education
April, 2000
New Orleans, LA
It took Lerone Bennett several decades
to write his newest book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream,
meticulously documenting Abraham Lincoln’s white supremacy beliefs. Bennett
shows that Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” was a conscious and
necessary deception that did not free a single enslaved African. Bennett
then shows the carelessness of historians, and even the cover-up of the record
by some, in order to let the myth survive. How ironic that many tears have been
shed by those who choose the Lincoln Memorial as a symbolic site to celebrate
African liberation, while oblivious to those who truly sought to free
Africans, not the least of whom were Africans themselves. Instead we honor an
opponent of equality who openly espoused white supremacy views until his death.
Then we accept a myth that is the opposite of the truth.
In many ways, the persistence of the
myth of Abraham Lincoln as a liberator of Africans is a symbol of the
contemporary response to the state of education of African Americans and of
African people worldwide. So much of what we believe about our state is false.
How do we account for this myth of the “Emancipator” and of
“emancipation.” It is in the curriculum and in the culture at large, a
belief in the face of all evidence to the contrary. And so, until this very
time, we have a whole nation in deep denial.
For the record, it was really the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution that outlawed
slavery or involuntary servitude, except, except as punishment for a crime. In
view of the current escalation of criminalization of African men in particular,
and of privatization of prisons and the use of prison labor in private
businesses, we can see that there are apparent limits to event the protection of
the 13th Amendment.
We actually have virtual slavery for some existing today. Moreover, it took the
14th Amendment
to guarantee equal protection of the laws to all citizens. So how can so
many of us join in the perpetuation of such a curriculum myth about Lincoln
freeing Africans from slavery and also believing in the political equality of
“the races,” and still be certain that we can be real when we approach the
design of education/socialization for our children? Are we habituated to myths?
Can we see the true condition of our people, the masses of them? Can we see, as Carter
G. Woodson saw, the miseducated though highly schooled among us, whose
orientation is “alien self” or even “anti-self” as Dr.
Na'im Akbar has said? What is the state of African education?
There are also some potent common myths
about African learners, myths about low ability, cultural deprivation, myths
about poverty causing learning problems, and myths that school treatments are
equitable for all children. These myths persist and are even adopted by many
members of the African community, even though we are a community with a long
history of creating powerful transforming educational and socialization
institutions, both in Africa and in the diaspora. We above all ought to be able
to detect myths right away. To grasp the real state of education of
African people everywhere, including in America, we must examine the
intersection of culture and power. A global system of power distribution has
dictated and continues to dictate the nature of the education and socialization
processes. Slavery, colonization, apartheid/segregation and the rationalizing
ideology of white supremacy are centuries old challenges, really aspects of a
global hegemonic system. That system interrupted and largely destroyed the flow
of thousand of years of powerful and independent African education/socialization
excellence, about which most of us are totally uninformed.
Above all, we must understand that the structure of
society and the embedded structure of education/socialization systems in
hegemonic societies are designed to maintain hegemony. It is the structure,
including especially its ideological foundation that controls possibilities for
African education/socialization, even today. Hegemonic structures and ideologies
cannot acknowledge or respect our traditions in education/socialization,
profound though they are. Moreover they shape the beliefs and the behaviors that
guide miseducation, while blaming victims. No matter how much progress we appear
to have made, more degrees and higher paying jobs for a few of us, there has
been no shift in the power structure at all, anywhere in the African world. Even
“liberated” and “independent” African nations, lack control over real
economic and military power. Few even have more than minimal control over their
education institutions. These institutions still mimic those of former colonial
masters in most cases. Some still have governance of education in the
hands of former colonial masters. While African people globally are
entitled to justice, including of course reparations, if any people were ever
entitled to them, and while we may have friends and allies, there will be no
saviors for us by others from these structural conditions. Nothing in history
suggests that non-African benefactors will rescue us. Purely and simply we must
emancipate ourselves from hegemonic structures; including especially the
foundation beliefs that support those structures. We must challenge these things
at every turn. We must pose and construct alternatives to them. We will
definitely get those things that we construct! We also will definitely get those
things that others construct for us in the absence of our own efforts to
construct our future. So, the state of “black education” cannot be
separated from the state of African people generally. It is a fundamental error
of major proportions to limit our analysis of this matter to Africans in
America. Africans all over the world were controlled by the same hegemonic
structures, and still are. Globally, our position remains on the bottom of
virtually all meaningful indices, even as other ethnic families, including new
ones to the United States, one after the other, lift themselves up, without
saviors. Even former colonial nations, not African, have entered the competition
as producers in the international mainstream.
Recently, I was forced to consolidate some of my thinking
on the nature of the problem of African people, within which the problems of
education/socialization are situated. I was invited to present a paper at the
Interdenominational Theological Seminary in Atlanta on the topic, “The
Spiritual State of Black American.” I identified “12 Challenges for African
People” in my response to this theme. The big picture for Africans is the same
everywhere in the world, because hegemonic structures are global.
Even now, enormous power is being consolidated everywhere,
with no priority on African development, e.g., The European Community (EC),
North Atlantic Free Trade Association (NAFTA) and General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade) (GATT). Equally important is globalization in the business
arena.
1. We are unconscious, with no global view of African
people and no global view of successful ethnic groups. We experience ourselves
as local people in a global world. Some of us experience ourselves only as
individuals without any connection even to a local African community.
2. We have acute amnesia, with no valid memories or
awareness of ourselves as a historical people evolving through time and
spreading throughout the world. We are episodic in our experience of ourselves.
3. We are disintegrating as a people and disorganized. We
have lost our solidarity. Many of us feel no bond of identity with our
people.
4. We are not raising our own children. We have no
systematic socialization structures for the masses of our children. They are
raising themselves or they are
5. We have a growing loss of independent faith
communities, becoming more subordinate in institutions that we do not control.
6. We have no long-range strategic goals, plans and
mobilization. Without these things nothing positive will happen for us.
7. We do not have an adequate comprehension of wealth
production and accumulation. Many of us make money. Few of us make wealth. Our
consumption appetites make us prime sources for exploitation by others.
8. We do not have an adequate comprehension of how to
nurture health and prevent illness. We do not have healthy diets. We do not
monitor and control our environment. We do not have a critical orientation about
these things.
9. We have no major independent, self-funded think tanks
to help us to define and to resolve our problems. We do not see how successful
group fund and rely upon ideas based upon research and reflection (Edwards,
1998).
10. We do not have an adequate African Centered Higher
Education. Definitions, assumptions, priorities and above all our worldviews
must reflect us.
11. We do not have sufficient cultural centers, movements, monuments, and celebrations to highlight important experiences and to shape directions. These things offer us the opportunity to be reflective and to develop a more firm vision of the future.
12. We have no regular independent communication
capabilities, such as serious national and international periodicals to address
our serious and continuing problems. This is shameful. It is not really a matter
of resources. It is a matter of consciousness. Appropriate socialization will
produce an appetite among the masses of our people for appropriate information.
I cannot amplify these points in the time available here.
However, it should be clear that if we begin with these challenges while
reflecting on our geo-political status as a people, they call for very special
approaches to education/socialization, approaches that can only come from us. It
should also be evident that something far beyond the common school experience is
required for our children, even though most of our children will continue to
attend common schools. Moreover, we must insure that this common school
experience taps the genius of our children and stops disabling them through
structured miseducation. Many of us rely totally on the common school
experience. That will not meet our complete needs. The socialization of the
masses of our children can only be done through structures that we develop and
control.
Most of the 12 Challenges mentioned above are tied
directly to our task of education/socialization, affecting directly the aim,
methods and content of education/socialization. However, out of all of these
high priority challenges, the first, becoming conscious, and the fourth, the
matter of control over the education/socialization of our children are critical.
Hegemonic structures were created to mis-educate enslaved and colonized people,
and people who were victims of white supremacy influenced structures of
domination. Indigenous and independent systems were destroyed. Colonial and
slave structures as well as apartheid and general white supremacy structures,
were created, including boarding schools, to separate children from parents and
communities and cultures, and especially mission schools to destroy the
worldviews and to stigmatize colonized and enslaved people as savages,
primitives, and pagans. The recent “culture wars” over the school curriculum
is a continuation in a newer form of ideological structures of hegemony that
follow the old path of separating children and communities from their
traditions. (Schlesinger, 1998) (Bloom, 1987) (Ravitch, 1996) (Hirsch, 1987).
So we see the denial of African culture, the denial of the
significance of African culture, the assertion of the supremacy of western
culture and the containment of teaching about African culture, even the
distortion and destruction of African history and cultures. Perhaps the worst of
all is the recent accelerating drift in the control of the
education/socialization structures, making our communities even more remote from
the power centers in education which follow their own agenda. The grip of others
who control our young people is becoming tighter. Among the obvious controls are
as follows:
1. There are trends toward removing control of schools
from local elected school boards, to mayors, governors, state departments of
education and even judges. Urban schools no longer tend to have Superintendents
who are close to the communities served. Corporate CEO’s, generals from the
military, business managers, and even prosecuting attorneys, without roots in
the culture or the community, are placed in charge of the large urban schools
where most of our children are. Whatever the weaknesses of local control at the
board level, there was at least a modicum of potential for community influence.
As our children are being managed and even exploited for profit, our communities
are more alien than ever from the process.
2. Privatization is growing in the public sector through
standardized curriculum using cyber technology. There is a corresponding loss of
community control over what is generally minimum competency, non-culturally
responsive curriculum and methodology. Private for profit corporations have
discovered the lucrative urban market. They are bringing industry practices to
the creation of “education maintenance organizations” (EMO’s). We have no
control over them with their minimum competency efforts. In fact some of us are
selling these things to our own community.
3. More and more we see publicly funded, large scale off
the shelf, cookie-cutter standardized programs for public schools, mainly urban,
mainly minimum competence, mainly non-culturally responsive. They see the Title
I dollars and other funds in urban education. Policy makers increasingly have
abandoned the belief in regular teachers and schools. They now shop for
large-scale “research based” programs. We have virtually no control over
these services. Some of our best educators look to these programs as saviors for
our children, even though the programs do not have excellence track records.
They are minimum competency at best. We are truly at risk.
4. The control over more than one million men in the
prisons and jails is appalling. Prisons are also places for “teaching
and learning,” mostly the wrong lessons. We do not control them. Many of them
have virtually abandoned the self-improvement courses and have become torture
chambers, or sources of below minimum wage cheap labor. Of what value to our
communities will young men be when they return?
When we combine the formal system trends with the control
of informal socialization through movies, videos, audios, advertising and
television, where is the space and time for our community to carry out its
responsibility for intergenerational cultural transmission? Our whole community
is in virtual lockdown. I do not expect anyone outside of our community to see
these matters as critical problems. Certainly we have heard nothing about this
threat so far. It is not on the radar screen, not even for many Africans.
However, so many within the African community itself, perhaps because of their
own alien socialization and mis-education, are not alert to this problem.
Therefore they do not see it as a priority for action. Therefore, we are not
mobilized to deal with these matters. Moreover, many of us have become experts
at implementing the most damaging parts of systems of structural inequity. For
example:
1. We assist in the non-beneficial use of mental
measurement and assessments that falsely label our children as impaired.
2. We manage tracking systems that result in the
disproportionate placement of our children in low tracks.
3. We teach non-culturally responsive curricula that leave
our children ignorant of themselves.
4. We sell privatized services and schools to public
schools, mainly in urban areas that enrich entrepreneurs with no real benefits
to our children.
It is clear to me that a major effort is required to make
any substantial meaningful and positive change in the education/socialization of
African children. However, no such change is even remotely possible until we can
effect a fundamental change in the dialogue about education/socialization. This
is first and foremost an internal dialogue within the African community. After
that we can address both the common school experience with others and the
African community’s responsibility for the broader socialization approaches.
Currently the heaviest emphasis in the education research
community in general is on children, how “intelligent” they are, which
“intelligences” they have, how “motivated” they are, and on “special
methods,” etc. I think that the emphases are misplaced. By now it should be
clear that, for the most part, our children are geniuses with capacities to go
far beyond any current school requirements. They respond very well to quite a
variety of well-executed methods and techniques. There is no mystery about how
to teach any of them. The priority that needs more emphasis is the deep study of
the quality of services that we offer to students, the unequal distribution of
those services and the structures of inequity such as tracking and inappropriate
special education, still existing in the school.
Why do our children fail to get access to the many educators who are not puzzled about how to teach them?
Our children’s manifest problems in public education
virtually all have to do with opportunity to learn. The evidence for this
conclusion is overwhelming, if we only raise and try to answer the right
questions. There is a growing body of powerful conclusions from literature
focusing on high poverty, high achieving students. Results by Schmoker (1996),
Closing the Gap by Kati Haycock (1998) and Value Added Evaluation by Saunders
and Rivers (1998) are but three of the newer citations adding to what Ron
Edmonds and his associates showed us long ago. It is clear that ordinary public
school teachers, with unselected regular classrooms, serving poor children,
without specialized standardized programs, can move students to the highest
academic levels in a short period of time. It is not the children or their
parents, poverty, culture or bilingual status (correlates that explain little or
nothing) that determine academic success. It is good teaching.1
It is also clear that poor and minority ethnic groups tend
to get a lower quality of instruction for many reasons, including high teacher
turnover, experienced teachers choosing more desirable neighborhoods, high rates
of substitute teachers, high rates of teachers teaching out of their fields and
a host of other factors that combine to produce what Kozol documented and called
Savage Inequalities (1991), also documented by other researchers. These are
realities not myths. This suggests to me where the education researchers’
focus should be, primarily on the quality of service and its distribution.
Our preoccupation with the analysis of the victims of
savage inequalities in the schools exhausts our resources and our energies and
may well impede progress toward valid teaching. Because African children’s
academic performance averages are usually low, our attention turns to
“multiple intelligences.” “whole language or phonics,” “site based or
central management,” off the shelf “cookie cutter programs,” etc. However,
these things do not address our basic problems, given the state of African
people with respect to opportunity. We do not have to wait for new discoveries
on how to teach. As Ron Edmonds has said: “We already know more than we need
to know.” At least some do.
In my opinion, the basic problems are elsewhere. I believe
that there is a prerequisite to any approach that would attempt to address the
problems that are basic. Most of the 12 Challenges that I cited earlier are
challenges that have education/socialization components. Almost none of the 12
Challenges influence the aims in schools that serve our children. But worse,
even if they did, the ideas about education/socialization that should serve as a
foundation for our work have been well articulated over the years, even
centuries, yet these ideas that come from deep thinkers of the African community
are unknown or marginalized. Therefore, the prerequisite for problem solving is
to do the homework that is necessary to understand the works of those who have
already done much homework for us. These ideas are fundamental conceptions about
problems and solutions.
Some examples of the indispensable works that must be
considered as the starting point for change in education/socialization of
African people are as follows:
Carter G.
Woodson - The Miseducation of the Negro
W. E. B.
DuBois - The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques
Marimba
Ani - Yurugu: An African
Centered Critique of European Thought and Behavior
Mwalimu Shujaa - Too Much Schooling: Too Little Education
– A Paradox of Black Life in White Societies
Molefi
Asante - The
Afrocentric Idea
Jacob
Carruthers - Intellectual Warfare
John H. Clarke - Africans at the Crossroads: Notes for an African World Revolution
Amos
Wilson - Blueprint
for Black Power: A Moral, Political, and Economic Imperative
Kwame and Akia Akoto - The Sankofa
Movement: ReAfrikanization and the Reality of War
Chinweizu
- The Decolonization of the African Mind
Ayi Kwei Armah - Two Thousand Seasons
Matthew Arnold - Steve Biko: Black Consciousness in South
Africa
Ben-Jochannan
- Cultural Genocide in the Black and African Studies Curriculum
Of course, there are other important better known
references. However, these are writers who call upon our community to develop an
independent vision, a vision that is grounded in our cultural and historical
reality as well as in our present political and economic condition, a vision
that is based upon an understanding of hegemony and education in its direct and
indirect forms and the structure that it creates, a vision that is rooted in our
excellence tradition of education/socialization, one of the most awesome
traditions in the world. (Hilliard, 1998)
Our problems persist because we are not asking the right
questions and are being diverted and consumed by the wrong ones. The state of
education for African people will remain at its low level, in a rut, unless and
until there is a return to an independent consciousness among our leadership in
general and our educational leadership in particular. By this I mean that
African leadership, guided by a deep grounding in our cultural heritage and
guided by a sense of destiny, must frame courses of action and must design the
essential education/socialization direction for our people. Having done
that, we can then determine what must be done in our communities and what
can be done in common schools, as well as how to make common schools culturally
responsive.
I am not calling for something strange. In fact, I have
outlined the very thing that successful global ethnic groups do now. Such groups
take responsibility to define and control the core education/socialization
processes for their ethnic families, with cultural transmission held as the
prerogative of the family. They may be and most often are enrolled in public
schools with other groups. They know that no one outside their families will
place the highest priorities on highest quality socialization. Our problem is
that our oppressors prefer to see us as individuals, not as an ethnic family.
Worse, many of us have fallen victim to this way of seeing ourselves.
One thing should be crystal clear by now. There is no
sense of crisis and no high priority being placed on the problem of
education/socialization for African people. There is no major mobilization in
place or being planned to get us out of the hole that we are in.
Nothing in place or publicly contemplated offers any
prospect that our general position in the global society will improve. Yes
there are a few who claim that African students have been emancipated, who claim
to be able to serve them well. They have tricks galore, standardized, mass
marketed, minimum competency, public and private businesses; mainly plying the
urban market. Our children and others are their commodities. They stuff the
children with advertising. Schools buy “teacher proof” software and
“programs” for them. Our children are still a part of the giant shell game,
bussing them from one place to another, chasing reluctant whites, moving from
outside segregation to inside segregation through tracking and special
education. We do not have efficacious processes in place, even for the common
school requirements.
The 400-year struggle for African people has been for a
legitimate education for the children, a high quality, culturally appropriate,
truthful education/socialization for our children. (Hamilton, 1968) It has been
a struggle against hegemony and for control over socialization of our own
children. We begin the new millennium with the same issues that we have always
had, just new faces and new forms. Who can be pleased with what we see as we
observe our people all over the world?
We know that at its base, our problem is a simple one. Can
we place our children in the care of well-prepared wise educators who love them
and who have the will to teach them? We need educators and leaders who are
oriented towards our destiny because they are rooted in a deep understanding of
our culture and traditions, educators who identify with and are a part of us,
educators who see our children as their own. Those who love our children and who
have the will to teach them will make whatever sacrifices are necessary to raise
our children up where they belong. Now is the time for the real liberators to
come forward. Some educational researchers already serve in this role; more can
by destroying myths. There is heroic work for educational researchers as a part
of this process.
1. Document and disseminate information about the many
educators who are not at all puzzled about how to raise achievement of all
children to high levels, educators who get excellent achievement now!
2. Evaluate the efficacy of tracking and special education
services, especially in the high incidence categories, services that hold so
many of our able students in custody, with little if any benefits, and sometimes
with harm. (Heller, Holtzman and Messick, 1982) (Skyrtic, 1991).
3. Document and disseminate information about savage
inequalities in services.
4. Study the availability of appropriate African ethnic
specific materials to enhance our understanding of all curriculum areas.
We must destroy myth and illuminate reality. We cannot
call oppressors liberators and cry with gratitude at their tombs.
Contrary to some popular opinion and even some
professional opinion, educators and systems are extremely powerful. We can
choose either powerful positive or powerful negative effects, and we can bring
either into being. The futures of children truly are in our hands.
What will we do?
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