My People Let’s Not Make Black People History, Each One Teach All…

Copyright By R2C2H2

My People Let’s Not Make Black People History, Each One Teach All…

By R2C2H2

“A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”

~Frederick Douglass

I am a true advocate for education…But my firsthand involvement in the education system teaches me something else….The education system is not broken, it never was as a matter of fact…It is doing what it is suppose to be doing which is being a feeder system for our prisons and military…It is sad that capable teachers are reduced to babysitter, caretakers and containers…It is sad that many inner city schools are more likely to receive an influx of police rather than an influx of talented and capable teachers in the classrooms…It is even sadder many of today’s young generation will be worse off than their parents and their grandparents…

I was recently in a classroom at a high school in Memphis…The teacher was reading instruction for the practice reading and writing assessment test that they were going to take in February of this year...Mind you that these were kids in their junior and senior years of high schools…Needless to say that many of these kids were functionally illiterate, many of them barely able to spell their names let alone read them.

What truly bothers me and has rubbed me the wrong way since was that the teacher told them to basically fake it meaning that if they don’t feel that they are capable of conceiving and writing five paragraphs with five sentences each that they should rewrite the instructions to the pre-test and put it in the correct form. She then told me in a matter of fact tone that the powers that be weren’t checking for accuracy and comprehension but perception: does it look right rather than does it be right…One kid basically gave up without trying and wrote just “I agree” on the paper…I was not necessarily upset with the individual teacher but rather with the system that allow and accept such low expectations form our teachers and students…

What’s even more tragic to me is that I consider the mental lynching of our children as black on black crime because the Memphis City Schools as well as the Memphis City and Shelby County governments respectively are controlled by Black folks! This is truly atrocious to say the least. This is psychological genocide. There’s a reason why the bible said my people perished because of lack of knowledge. How ironic that Black History being the coldest and shortest month of the year that the pathology of the black community matches it in sentiment and deed.