Article #4 >>>>> A Better Way: Toward a Knowledge-Intensive K-12 Education

Imagine the Minneapolis Public Schools improving so thoroughly as to become a model urban central school district that similar organizations in other cities can utilize as reference for their own overhaul of K-12 education at the level of the central school district.


In my new book (Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education [ten of fourteen chapters now complete]) focused on the subject areas of economics, political science, psychology, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English usage, fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics;  I am providing the knowledge and skill set that would provide the essence of the curriculum productive of well-educated graduates of the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS). Based on such a solid base of academic information and skills, graduates of MPS would possess knowledge that even our present version of university graduates in the United States would be happy to remember from courses in the given subject areas.


What I am doing in all aspects of the New Salem Educational Initiative--- including writing Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education; monthly production of the academic Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota; hosting of the television show The K-12 Revolution with Dr. Gar Marvin Davison (every Wednesday at 6:00 PM on Channel 17, Minneapolis Telecommunications Network [MTN]); personally conducting 17 small-group college preparatory academic sessions per week in a network that includes 125 students and their family members; superintending the Tuesday Tutoring program at New Salem Missionary Baptist Church; speaking at numerous public venues (including monthly appearances during Public Comment time at the convening of the MPS Board of Education); and the posting of articles approaching 300 in number on this blog--- is providing a vision for K-12 education and the future of North Minneapolis that encompasses what I am hoping to leave to the world when my own days on earth are numbered.


Imagine MPS extrapolating the principles of the New Salem Educational Initiative so as to design a locally centralized school system worthy as a model for the excellent liberal arts education that I am always advancing and that I am now detailing in the nearly completed book.


Imagine school classrooms from the K-5 level forward that are replete with academic resources of both the venerable print and the contemporary technological sort. Hold in your consciousness an image of classroom walls and hallways filled with maps of continents, nations, and ecosystems from throughout the world; and with prints of great works of art and visual representations (paintings, photographs, and sculpture) of historical personages of great thought and accomplishment. Consider the transformative lifetime impact on young people who fully function at grade level in mathematics and reading and then follow academically committed teachers on a journey through the exciting world of knowledge.


Think about the effects on the lives of our precious young people, alive in the world of knowledge and excited by the banter of teachers who truly love them and who effortlessly blend academic, comedic, and culturally attuned comments into their verbal expressions, their communications, their teaching. Imagine schools as genuine places of knowledge acquisition that welcome students, their families, and community members to the sites and into the hallways of learning and ethics. Into these hallways would come experts from the realms of academia, business, government, social service, and theology to talk to MPS students and their families in a setting alive with the love of knowledge and ethical action--- and to engage in lively intellectual encounters with teachers capable of exchanging informed views with people of enormous information bases and great expertise.


Ethics would be an important topic for discussion in the schools of the future for MPS, with powerful conversations flowing in consideration of ethical precepts from the world's great religious traditions, applied in the context of an extensive knowledge base acquired both through dedicated academic study and active engagement with the workaday world: Young people and their families would be invited to participate in discussions focused on the nature of the good, the beautiful, and the empathic--- for the express purpose of advancing human understanding and promoting peaceful, productive relationships among people.


Imagine beckoning rooms in our schools from the K-5 level forward that are packed with great classic and contemporary works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; performance stages; technological resource area; media center; kitchen for student use; along with conventional classrooms used for traditional purposes and as centers for discussion, lectures, and speeches. Imagine schools from the K-5 level forward that include spaces for instruction in the vocational and technical arts, arranged for particular students upon expressed interest, so that the transmission of liberal arts knowledge would flourish alongside instruction that could include auto repair, plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, and various other vocational arts.


Minneapolis in general and North Minneapolis specifically would become much better places for our young people and their families to dwell--- very much including those who are my personal passion: those who have been mired in cyclical familial poverty for generations. Schools would become tangible expressions of the joy of knowing and understanding the great world and universe, centers of information and wisdom in the midst of a community that radiates love of knowledge, ethical conduct, human beings.


I am developing the New Salem Educational Initiative as a vanguard community, formed by the 125 students and family members in my network, with the view of educating hordes of others interested in increasing their knowledge in all manner of subjects and coming to a place where ethics and moral conduct are treated as cherished guides to human action and interaction. A very definite component of my vision is the transformation of the image of the North Minneapolis community that I love, from the perception of a place of destitution and violence to the recognized center of advanced academic knowledge and elevated ethical conduct.


This can and must happen in the future overhaul of K-12 education at the level of the locally centralized school district, with the Minneapolis Public Schools serving as model to a world that must thrive on the basis of knowledge and ethics, rather than perishing for a lack thereof.


To those African American people living at the urban core, we owe this quality of education as a matter of sacred recompense.