Article #1
Culpability of MPS Decision-Makers
For the
Murder of George Floyd
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment