America is a talented schizophrenic that thrives on rationalizing contradictions—particularly those contradictions meant to explain away historical inequalities and their under-developed offspring that live in the usual demographics of race, class and gender. Americans are not born as talented schizophrenics, for this is a special kind of crazy that has to be taught and learned. And it is American education that is situated right at the crossroads of human potential and the needs of the schizophrenic system to maintain itself. Negotiations at the crossroads of human potential and the needs of the schizophrenic system to maintain itself almost always fall out in favor of the system.
But what of educational reform—those periodic eruptions of consciousness that are in fact variations of Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”—or, is reform really a systems maintenance response to pressures from the “real people?” Systems do behave like organisms, particularly when they feel threatened. So when the “educational establishment” (those women and men who benefit financially, politically, and culturally by keeping the educational system as it is) feels heat from the “real people” they work feverishly to build furnaces around that heat in order to turn the heat into energy that fortifies their castles and deepens the motes surrounding them. You can call the process a variation of Muhammad Ali’s “rope a dope” strategy: the establishment gives the illusion of being hurt (“on the ropes” as it were), so that those landing blows feel that they are really getting through. The compromise reached from this theater is not meant to develop human potential; it is meant to cloak the plan to limit human potential in rhetoric and to hide the fact that descriptions have changed, but power relations have not.
Certainly educational reform has resulted in improvements in access and achievement. But we have to ask: access to what? Certificate programs in Feng Shui offered synchronously on the Titanic hardly seem like career opportunities. And integration as access succeeded most spectacularly in the deracination of African American institutions—a success that over time led to Black parents having less and less institutional control over the education of their children.
The achievement gap has for some time been the latest indicator used to assert the need for reform. Generally, the achievement gap indicates that non-African American, and non Latino children score higher on standardized tests than do African American and Latino children. The “gap” is extrapolated to foreshadow diminished life chances for the low scoring students. By way of a personal anecdote, I want to illustrate the irrelevance of the “gap:” after having been admitted to Ball State University, I was given a reading test and my scores were so dismal that my college freshman counselor suggested that I withdraw from Ball State, and head back to my hometown of Gary, Indiana where secure employment awaited me at the now extinct U.S. Steel Corporation. Because I was (am) a singularly hard-headed Negro brought up to be cool and confident no matter what, I found a way to move forward, ultimately earning a PhD in English from Indiana University, as well as a Masters degree in Political Science from Atlanta University—the institution where W.E.B. DuBois did some of his most important work.
My story is routine, and is echoed in both seminal texts like The Autobiography of Malcolm X and in the stories of many of my peers whose present success belies the relevance of the “gap” into which my college counselor wanted to push me. But what my generation had that the present generation does not have were a group of women, men and teens energetically engaged in trying to heal America “the talented schizophrenic.” My generation had people engaged in pushing America to make the right decision at the crossroads between human potential and systems maintenance—decisions that embraced limitless nature of human potential. We require a return to the future: we need a non-violent revolution.
Until educational reform focuses on human potential in the way it plans, structures, presents and evaluates learning opportunities we will have more of the same: the application of various hues of makeup on a pig with the disingenuous assertion that the pig isn’t a pig. And when the people wash away the pig’s makeup, revealing its essential “pig-ness” the rationalized contradictions will resume.
Our children deserve better. Humanity deserves better.
Posted by: |