Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Mis-Education of Our Youth


The education gap that plagues the African Communities in Amerikkka is not a new story. Every since the kidnapping of our people from our Motherland, Black youth have been alienated and knowingly mis-educated inside an educational system created by the white ruling class of Europe and the U.S. History is best qualified to teach us that the white ruling class of this country is invested in and will forever attempt to keep the masses of working class and African people impoverished and subjected to hostile conditions. The current sweep of educational reform, from the local to national stage, functions to further this truth under the glaze of a “post-racial” or “colorblind” society. Even with all of the empty partisan rhetoric the conditions on the ground have not changed significantly for the majority of African youth trapped inside the mis-education camps of the western world known as institutions of primary, secondary, and “higher” education. The solution to our collective problem must and will come from poor and working class people’s ability to organize ourselves to provide the education for our youth.

The problem that we are faced with today is a legacy of a social status quo in this country that perpetrates the idea that an educated African is a dangerous one. This philosophy comes from the wealthiest one percent of this country and is the underlining reason for the manufacturing of the ongoing educational gap. In April 1965, under the regime of then U.S. President Lynden B. Johnson, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was signed into law, one of the many laws in Amerikkka’s “war on poverty”. The ESEA was created to target schools and school districts where forty percent, or more, of the students came from low-income families and was originally only intended to be in effect for five years. Title I of this bill mandates the distribution of funds to schools and school districts that are in obvious need of better funding, and low achieving schools and school districts that need improvements on tests scores. Every five years since the initiation of this decree it has been continually reauthorized and or amended to ensure that the public education system would continually turn out new generations of laborers to exploit for capital gain.

There is a class interest in the under-education of working class people and their children and this interest is what generates the continuous mass incarceration of the poor, working class, Native and African peoples of this country. The most recent national statistics on education from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that almost seventy percent of state educational students are proficient in reading or math skills. The student dropout rate represents youth between ages 16 and 24 years old who have not received a high school diploma or equivalent GED certificate. This dropout rate has declined from 14% in 1980’s to 8% in 2009, but note that this figure does not include youth who have been captured and imprisoned inside the concentration camps of Amerikkka. High school dropout rates have been on the decline across all demographics between 1980’s and 2009, although rates for European Amerikkkan students have remained the lowest among all groups. The dropout rate among Hispanic students has remained nearly twice that of the African students whose dropout rates have lingered at nearly twice that of European Amerikkkan students. The decline in dropout rates during the last two to three decades is directly related to the mass incarceration of youth in this country. The "land of the free" holds less than 5% of the world’s population, but hold over 25% of the world’s prisoners. We, as poor, working class African people must recognize that this education gap will be perpetuated as long as we send our youth to be mis-educated by the ruling class of bourgeois capitalist in educational institutions which teach bourgeois ideals.

The culture of lies taught in Amerikkka attempts to confuse working class, Black and Brown people into believing that the educational disparity is not dependent on just on social or economic causes. The truth of the problem is that we do not control the education of our youth, and we depend on the oppressor to educate our children. We must recognize our common enemies' agenda and a part of its result is the educational under-achievement that continues to plague poor, working-class, Brown and Black Communities. Direct community organizing is the solution to keep pressure on the elected officials to place working class interest first on the political agenda. We, the people with the problem, must organize ourselves to resolve this issue and regain our self determination.

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