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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