This is
the book that I wrote for the most immediate benefit of my students in the New
Salem Educational Initiative and then, by extension, for all of those people,
essentially the entire populace of the United States, who have been subjected
to public education in this nation.
My
students all come to me from the Minneapolis Public Schools. Our relationship and my instruction then
becomes a constant in their lives: I
follow them wherever they go; many of my
students have moved to other schools within MPS, others have gone to St. Paul,
others to Brooklyn Park or Columbia Heights or Coon Rapids or other near
suburbs, some have moved out of the Twin Cities Metro and even out of
state. I continue to provide weekly
instruction to my students or, in the case of those few who move out of the
state or more than 60 miles beyond Minneapolis-St. Paul, continued mentorship. My students are all on free/ reduced price
lunch, most are at the bottom of the income scale in Minnesota, and one family
in particular is the poorest that I have ever encountered in my 45 years of
providing education to the poorest of the poor.
I feel a
sacred responsibility to continue to provide my students with weekly
instruction, because in the two hours that they spend with me they learn more
than they learn in 33 hours of class time endured in the wretched schools of
Minneapolis.
Increasingly,
students come to me on the academic trail of older siblings, so that I have
known them all their lives and provided weekly instruction since they were in
kindergarten. But for those who do still
come to me in, say, the third or seventh or eleventh grade, their knowledge base
is nearly empty. These academic refugees
from the classrooms of the Minneapolis Public Schools typically, to provide
just a few examples, do not know the following:
>>>>> that the year 1776 was in the 18th
century (invariably failing to recognize the significance of the year as that
of the Declaration of Independence and most often incorrectly placing
1776 in the 17th or even some more inaccurate century);
>>>>> that the Civil War spanned the years
1861-1865, involved a war between the Union, representing the United States of
America (USA), of mostly northern states, and a Confederacy (Confederate States
of America) of southern states that had declared secession from the USA;
>>>>> that the Civil War was followed by a
period called Reconstruction that ended with the Compromise of 1877, devolving
into the Jim Crow system in which the 14th and 15th
Amendments to the United States Constitution
were controverted, with the legal sanction of the Supreme Court in Plessy
v. Ferguson;
>>>>> any of the meanings of the terms
liberal, conservative, socialist, communist, capitalist, democracy, republic,
absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, or parliamentary system;
>>>>> any sense of the identity or the
defining concepts of the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, the eminent
behaviorist B. F. Skinner, or the influential humanist Abraham Maslow;
>>>>> any sense of the identity or the
defining concepts of the towering figures of science: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, Einstein;
>>>>> any sense of the meaning of the economics
terms GDP, recession, depression, deficit, debt, or the three great economists
Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes;
>>>>> any sense of the contrasting
approaches to betterment of the African American condition offered by Booker T.
Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. DuBois;
>>>>> any comparative understanding of the
dramatic works of Lorraine Hansberry, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, August
Wilson, or Ntozake Shange.
And so it
goes.
…………………………………………………………………………
I got
tired of having to give lectures on all of the terms and subject matter that
would have to be understood to grasp the meaning of any reading of substance.
So I wrote
my now nearly complete book, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts
Education, used as a text for assignments and reading with my students,
a powerful tool for providing them with the education that the terrible classes
of the Minneapolis Public Schools do not.
My
students now have firm grasp of the essentials of economics, psychology,
political science, world religions, world history, American history, African American
history, world and English literature, English usage, fine arts (visual and
musical), mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics; and ancillary knowledge of an array of other social
and natural sciences.
Younger
students whom I serve as Alternate Universe Superintendent of the Minneapolis
Public Schools are already receiving the complete benefits of the grade by
grade knowledge-intensive curriculum of which I have written in articles as you
scroll on down this blog.
Now
eleventh and twelfth grade students for whom I have responsibility as Alternate
Universe Superintendent of the Minneapolis Public Schools will be able not only
to receive that same benefit in their current coursework; they will also be able to receive what they
did not receive before I took the position of Alternate Universe Superintendent
and instituted the new knowledge-intensive curriculum. They will now go across the stage at
graduation to claim a piece of paper that actually signifies a high school
diploma. Their brains will be alive in
the wonderful world of knowledge. They will
be fully prepared to move on to colleges, universities, or the practice of remunerative
trades. They will be culturally enriched
with a knowledge-intensive education in the liberal, technological, and
vocational arts; civically prepared to
vote knowledgeably or to participate actively in the political system; and academically positioned for lives of
professional satisfaction.
............................................................................
Within a year, this excellence of education will sweep in from the Alternate Universe to grace the lives and families of students now confined to the conventional universe of Superintendent Ed
Graff and the conventional MPS Board of Education.
The K-12 Revolution
is in motion.
Excellent
education will soon be a reality not only for students in the Alternate
Universe Minneapolis Public Schools:
Students and families now languishing in the academic miasma of the
MPS conventional universe are about to peer into the brighter futures for which they
have been waiting a very long time.
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