We Can Cheat Our Babies No Longer

We can cheat our babies, our precious children, our students, our lifeblood, our future no longer.

 

Whenever I welcome a new student to the New Salem Educational Initiative, among the many treasures of the human legacy, the many items of information of which she or he has absolutely no knowledge are the following:

 

>>>>>    any sense of the age of the universe (13.8 billion years), or the earth (4.5 billion years)

 

>>>>>    any understanding of the evolution of humanity from East African origins among Australopithecus, homo habilis, and homo erectus until the arrival of true humans (homo sapiens) about 100,000 years ago

 

>>>>>    any knowledge of the Greeks, Romans, the cultures of Mycenae, the Mayas, the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, India from the Indus Valley Civilization to the arrival of the Aryans, the great West African civilizations of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai

 

>>>>>    any grasp of the meaning of feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, liberalism, conservatism

 

>>>>>    any sense of why Copernicus and Galileo were so revolutionary, why the mathematical calculations, terrestrial, and cosmic discoveries of Newton and Einstein were so extraordinary

 

>>>>>    any sense of why people do what they do, according to the contrasting theories, observations, and experiments of Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, Abraham Maslow, George A. Miller, or the many neuropsychologists now revealing the wonders of the human brain

 

>>>>>    any ability to locate the Mediterranean Sea or the Ural Mountains on the globe; any ability to locate Paris, London, Mogadishu, Lagos, Beijing, Tokyo, Istanbul---  even, very frequently, geographic locations within the United States such as Washington, D. C., Portland (Oregon), Seattle, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Tallahassee, Atlanta, Houston, Albuquerque, Phoenix;  and, frequently, even more tellingly, any facility even to point quickly to the 48 contiguous states, Alaska, or Hawaii

 

>>>>>    any sense of the dramatic greatness of August Wilson, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Lorraine Hansberry

 

>>>>>    any understanding of the precise causes or temporal span of the Civil War, the failure of Reconstruction, the Compromise of 1877, Plessy V. Ferguson, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Northern Migration. A.  Philip Randolph, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Toure), SNCC, CORE, restricted housing covenants

 

>>>>>    any grasp of the rich variety of musical and theatrical traditions of the world:  Chinese opera, Japanese kabuki, the precise percussive traditions of Africa, Western baroque and romantic and classical, or the evolution of rhythm and blues/country western/rock and roll/hip-hop from the work songs of the slaves, blues, and jazz

 

We cheat our babies every day our feet hit the ground by denying them their cultural legacy from the great, wide world of knowledge.  

 

Hiding behind shibboleths of “critical thinking” and “lifelong learning”---   ironically emanating from education professors, who are among the least adept at critical analysis and the most knowledge-deplete professorial presences on any university campus---  our ill-trained teachers, principals, and central office administrators do not impart what they cannot impart to their students:  the knowledge that they themselves lack.

 

We must do better.

 

Thus, the vital importance of the K-12 revolution:

 

And thus a call to all activists who grasp the gravity of the situation, and who care enough to participate in the revolution via which we must bring skill-replete, knowledge-intensive education to all of our precious children, of all demographic descriptors.