Jun 25, 2020

Article #1 in a Five-Article Series >>>>> Culpability of Decision-Makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools for the Murder of George Floyd >>>>> Introduction


Crystalized in the curricular approach and the quality of personnel at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) are the two root causes of the George Floyd murder by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. 


 

Curriculum at the Minneapolis Public Schools is knowledge-deficient.  Administrators who make decisions regarding the academic program, most especially at this juncture interim academic chief Aimee Fearing and superintendent Ed Graff, have meager credentials;  and the teachers whom they oversee have very limited knowledge bases. 

 

In all manner of subjects, knowledge-poor curriculum and teachers leave students with little information by which to evaluate national events or to inform participation in the political process.  This is now weighing especially heavy with regard to student information bases in history:  Students who manage to graduate from MPS and other locally centralized school districts go forth as uninformed citizens whose ignorance of history now degrades our body politic and our mass protests.

 

Lack of historical knowledge and knowledge-poor curriculum killed George Floyd:

 

Very few people have the barest understanding of United States history.

 

Perpend:

 

Thomas Jefferson and James Madison produced the most cogent syntheses of the Enlightenment ideals of John Locke (author among other works of Second Treatise on Government) and Montesquieu (Spirit of the Laws).  Jefferson imbibed the works of Locke and worked his innovation on Locke’s emphasis on the fundamental freedoms of life, liberty, and property, changing the latter to the “pursuit of happiness.”  Montesquieu most clearly articulated the division of a national government into three equal branches that especially in separating the judiciary from the executive and the legislative thrust a seminal notion into the ether of political theory.  Madison’s synthesis of Enlightenment ideas as principal author of the United States Constitution represented an enormous advance in the production of a political framework for the establishment of nationhood.

 

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their colleague George Washington, the latter both as head general in the American Revolution and first president of the new nation, created a political entity that rivaled, with the potential to exceed, Great Britain as the world’s paragon of democracy.  But Jefferson, Madison, and Washington, were imperfect, as was the nation that they created:  Jefferson, Madison, and Washington all expressed misgivings about the institution of slavery while amassing fortunes on the basis of that very institution;  and the new nation was established on the basis of a citizenry limited as to gender and ethnicity. 

 

The great democratic treatise that is the United States Constitution tacitly gave the vote only to white male owners of considerable property, counted Native Americans not at all and those in bondage as three-fifths-persons for the purpose of determining representation in the United States House of Representatives.  Seventh president Andrew Jackson has been considered by many historians as the chief executive most responsible for expanding the electorate to include those white men who did not own property;  he had also led military battles against Native Americans, proposed removal from land sought by white settlers, and was a vigorous proponent of slavery.

 

Thus, the architects of the nation that would in time, on the basis of constitutional amendments and the capacity for legislative innovation, tend toward increasing democratization, were all proponents of slavery who launched a nation upon racist assumptions and a limited notion of “the people.”

 

Those are the facts.

 

What do we do with the contradictions?

 

Do we jerk down all sculptured monuments and all nomenclature on edifices honoring those most responsible for establishing the foundation of the United States as an imperfect experiment in Enlightenment values, founders who could be construed as racist and sexist believers in democracy and republican governance?

 

Perhaps we should dismantle those monuments and remove those names;  but as we do, we should be aware of the ironies that should instill in us enormous feelings of cognitive dissonance.

 

Slavery was widely practiced and accepted in various forms throughout the world by the late 18th and early 19th centuries;  the long tenure of that institution on the international stage waned as the 19th century unfolded.  For citizens of the United States, the greatest shame is not having embraced the institution of slavery during a time of the institution’s historical entrenchment, but in promoting post-manumission forms of that same institution, with ever more virulent racism.  In the aftermath of the Compromise of 1877 ending Reconstruction and the 1896 Supreme Court decision for segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, conditions abided wherein the Jim Crow system and vigilante violence induced African Americans to flee from the rural South to the urban North, where they were typically residentially confined to certain areas at the urban core.

 

Nearly 100 years ensued between 1877 and the legislative initiatives of the 1960s that ended most legal forms of discrimination.  White and African American middle class flight left behind an increasingly impoverished population at the urban core, including areas such as North Minneapolis and those areas of South Minneapolis extending from East Lake Street.   And at that historical moment an approach to education, transmitted increasingly from the 1920s until taking firm hold by the 1970s, denied a knowledge-intensive education to those most in need of knowledge and skills necessary for highly remunerative employments and civic participation.

 

Thus it is that administrators and teachers in the Minneapolis Public Schools are themselves knowledge-deficient and send forth students who become the uninformed citizenry that we now have.  If one examines the life of George Floyd, one observes a noble but at best partially successful effort to escape conditions of life at the urban core.  And if one considers the impoverished knowledge base of Derek Chauvin and his low comprehension of the origin of conditions prevailing in the community he was pledged to serve, one discerns that the incident poignantly demonstrates the danger ever abiding in our knowledge-poor society.

 

The citizenry is produced mainly by the institutions of family and public education.  Public education is the main conveyor of attitudes and information shared by the populace as a whole.  The shortcomings in ethical values and subject area knowledge in the curriculum of locally centralized systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools produce the level of immorality and ignorance that we now witness in our society.

 

Thus, the United States is now mired in a predicament produced by ignorance of history and an intellectually corrupt approach to preK-12 education.

 

As our own urban example, the Minneapolis Public Schools must be overhauled to produce knowledge-intensive curriculum and citizens who go forth with necessary knowledge of history and of the key subject areas of mathematics, natural science, economics, government, psychology, and the visual and musical arts.

 

As the situation now abides, decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools are prime culprits in creating our current national morass.

 

They must change.

 

Or they must go.            

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