Jun 26, 2018

The K-12 Revolution Will Make of the United States the Democracy That We Imagine Ourselves to Be >>>>> (Part Four of a Multi-Article Series >>>>> Major Principles in the K-12 Revolution, for Mandated Study by Aspiring Superintendents and School Board Members)

The United States has never functioned as a democracy. 

 

Throughout most of United States history, the nation has for African American people operated as a totalitarian state. 

 

As of 1789, most people of African heritage counted constitutionally as “all other persons” who were not free, indentured, or Native American.  The free and the indentured were counted in determining apportionment by states in the House of Representatives;  African Americans were counted at the fractional three-fifths, while untaxed Native Americans were counted not at all.  Women were counted for the purpose of determining representation in the House, but they had to wait until 1920 to vote, and they awaited the late 1960s and early 1970s for legal guarantees that moved them nearer to equality with men.

 

African American men should have achieved full citizenship according to the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, but the Compromise of 1877, Jim Crow, Black Codes, interposition, nullification, vigilante judges, and lynching jurists favored de facto practices over de jure formulations.  Formal citizenship for African Americans came with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, but a post-Reconstruction history of migration and Northern-style segregation yielded urban ghettos wherein the equality of opportunity inherent in democracy could not abide.

     

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted on 2 July, fifty years ago at the publication of this new journal.  But fifty years hence, we still do not have democracy.  We will only have democracy when we provide excellent education to all of our young people, providing those living at the urban core a genuine route out of the entrapment of multigenerational poverty, pressures conducive to familial dysfunction, recourse to pharmaceutical pleasure, easy money discovered en route to incarceration, and a life that will never know the cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that excellent education bestows.

 

An excellent education provides cultural sustenance.  The world comes alive in appreciation of the musical forms of classical, jazz, rhythm and blues, blues, folk, country, and rock and roll.  The visual cortex lights up with excitement in viewing the work of the Old Masters, Impressionists, Expressionists, Cubists, and Abstractionists.  The cosmos becomes a source of wonder upon contemplation of the great astronomical concatenation that followed a tremendous explosion 13.8 billion years ago.  Language and dramatic insight flow from the literary treasures of William Shakespeare and August Wilson.  Historical context explains the advent of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinhem, the power of their conviction, the impact of their activism. The Pythagorean Theorem is seen for the sheer beauty of its explanatory precision.  Newtonian Laws of Motion explain one’s traverse across earthly expanses, Einstein’s Relativity provides introduction to worlds beyond worlds.

 

An excellent education provides civic preparation.  One understands the great experiment of the Enlightenment that is the United States.  The educated person has a grasp of constitutional principles and can personally evaluate Supreme Court decisions.  One understands the historical forces that have produced roles and statuses pertinent to class and gender.   She who has received an excellent education knows the function and the functioning of the Electoral College, understands caucus and primary, has the knowledge base to file for public office, comprehends the array of issues necessary for effective campaigning.  He who has the educational foundation to join the informed electorate can determine on the basis of historical fact, national relevance, and international circumstances the wisdom of sending the sons of mothers and the daughters of fathers forth into potentially lethal battle.

 

An excellent education provides professional satisfaction.  Fueled with the power of an excellent education, a person can take one’s position in the fields of medicine, law, education, business, or agriculture.  Given the options provided by an excellent education, decisions regarding vocation may be rendered with considerations of responsibility to the family formed of spouse, children, and relatives;  and the family formed of humanity.  Dedication to a satisfying job gives a person a sense of dignity, the spirit of contributing to the familial and the greater good, and the abiding assumption that at the end of this earthly journey a legacy will remain.

 

People of all ethnicities of whatever economic wherewithal deserve the cultural sustenance, civic preparation, and professional satisfaction that an excellent education brings.  Excellent education for most people must be gained in the schools of locally centralized school districts.  An excellent K-12 education is defined by knowledge and skill sets especially yielding information across the liberal arts of math, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), social science (upon a foundation of history, geography, and economics;  with introduction to political science, psychology, sociology, and anthropology);  and the fine arts (visual and musical).  An excellent education can only be imparted by excellent teachers, who by definition are pedagogically gifted professionals possessing deep and broad subject area knowledge across the liberal arts. 

 

The locally centralized school district is the unit in the United States best positioned to impart an excellent education.  It also must be the organization that provides teacher retraining, so that well-meaning and dedicated teachers who truly strive for excellence can overcome the inadequacy of their training in departments, schools, and colleges of education.

 

We must get this mission in our guts:

 

We must feel in the depths of our individual and collective souls the responsibility to all of our precious children.  We cannot wait until all families are the perfections of our imagination.  If all families are not as we think they should be, be must embrace all children as our own.  Through excellent K-12 education we can shape a different world.  We can pay the debt of history and atone for the misdeeds of our forbearers, even as we seize the instruments of democracy that our ancestors have placed in our hands.  For to be sure, we can at last achieve true democracy by providing equal opportunity for every person via our transformation of K-12 education.

 

The beauty of all of this for those of us living in Minneapolis is that we have been graced with an educational leader in Bernadeia Johnson who has the requisite courage, the intellectual ability, and the manifest compassion that will be needed to turn an underperforming school district into a model for urban educational excellence.  We need not go to Guatemala to build schools, though that is a great service if we can do that, too.  We do not have to wait until the next hurricane hits Haiti, although compassion for people in other places is a wonderful thing.  But there are people very near your house, close to your community, living a short flight of the robin from your abode, who await the justice to which you can contribute if you care enough.

 

You need not go to an international outpost, to Washington, D. C., or even to the state Capitol in St. Paul to make a difference.  The opportunity to make an enormous difference lies in organizational and personal effort to overhaul K-12 educational at the Minneapolis Public Schools.  You can voice support the necessary overhaul at school board meetings and public forums.  You can promote and work for school board candidates who are not lackeys of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT) and the Democrat Farmer Labor (DFL) party.  You can offer your own tutorial services and recruit others to assist teachers at the High Priority Schools;  and if you can do this well, you will make a direct contribution to educational excellence for every child.

 

And in doing these things you will be helping to realize, for the first time in United States history, the vision of a democratic society by revolutionizing K-12 education.

No comments:

Post a Comment