Article #1 of Multi-Article Series >>>>> A Short Course in African American History

African Origins
 

Africans:  Ancestors to All Humankind

The ancestors of all human beings were from Africa.

About 4 million years ago, the hominid Australopithecus dwelt in East Africa;  this creature had a much smaller brain than would be the case for homo sapiens (modern human), but its body featured many characteristics of the human.  Around 2.5 million years ago, the hominid homo habilis appeared alongside Australopithecus and put its larger brain to work fashioning tools of rock and wood.

Approximately 1.5 million years ago, the hominid homo erectus walked upright and put its still larger brain to work to produce fire for cooking food and generating warmth.  Homo erectus was the first hominid emigrant population, heading generally on a northeastwardly trek, into Southeast, South, Central, and East Asia. 

Approximately 200,000 years ago the modern human, homo sapiens, with three-pound brain and the full physical and mental characteristics of humanity, appeared in places just a bit northward in the same general region of East Africa as homo erectus.   Homo sapiens became the second emigrant population to make its way out of Africa but followed a different trek than that of homo erectus, heading most notably to what we today know as Europe, encountering the creature homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal human).  The Neanderthals coexisted with homo sapiens but by about 75,000 years ago had been variously absorbed or competitively overwhelmed by these true humans.  Human beings then spread out with remarkable swiftness over the globe:  Eurasia by about 150,000 B.C., Australia by 100,000 B.C. (BCE), the Bering Strait into the Americas by about 12,000 B.C. (BCE).

So by 12,000 B. C. (BCE), descendants of common African ancestors covered the globe.  The people who populated the globe developed many distinct cultures and many varieties of tools, diets, social arrangements, and early religious expression as they adapted to particular geographic settings and climatic demands.  Skin pigmentation developed in evolutionary fashion, according to the processes of natural selection, producing a range between the very light-skinned northern Europeans and dark-skinned Africans.

People on the continent of Africa were among the first to make tools.  They were the first to make bone tools, and they were among those producing tools in five main traditions:  Oldowan (simple chopping and flake tools), biface (hand axes chipped on both sides for cutting), flake (small cutting and flaking tools), single-stone blade (many usable blades from a single stone), and microlith (small tools used as projectile points and for carving softer materials).  Around 800,000 years ago fishers living in the basin of the Congo River invented sophisticated tackle to catch giant catfish.


In Africa, as elsewhere, people came to discover that implantation of certain seeds can produce a predictable crop, yielding the possibility of settled village life.  When this happened, humanity moved from the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) phase into the Neolithic (New Stone Age) phase.  People in Egypt were among the first to cultivate crops, doing so along the majestic Nile River.  Neolithic societies arose in sub-Saharan Africa during 6,000-3,000 B. C. (BCE), about the same time that agricultural societies were also developing in Europe.  

Classical Egypt

About 3100 B.C. (BCE), King Menes of Upper (southern) Egypt superintended victory over a competing kingdom in Lower (northern) Egypt, setting up a capital at Memphis, just south of the fertile Nile Delta region.  King Menes and his successors during an early stage lasting until about 2700 B. C. (BCE) were considered divine, the living embodiment of the falcon-god Horus.  Farmers tilling the rich soil along the Nile River irrigated their fields and used some of the world’s first plows.


During the period of 2686-2181 B. C. (BCE) known as the Old Kingdom, Egyptians constructed the pyramids.  Among the most notable of these were the first product of this kind of construction, the Step Pyramid in Memphis in honor of the pharaoh Zoser, designed by his vizier (prime minister), Imhotep;  and the multi-chamber Great Pyramid at Gaza, highly advanced in technique and intricacy, overseen by the pharaoh Khufu.

Internal rivalries and invasion by Asiatic tribesmen from the Sinai caused chaos, decline, and the eventual fading of the Old Kingdom into the First Intermediate Period (2181-2050 B. C. [BCE]).  The pharaoh Montuhotep II inaugurated a new dynasty that began the period of c. 2050-1786 known as the Middle Kingdom.   Montuhotep II and successors such as Amenemhat I and those in the familial line Senruset I, II, and III superintended military campaigns southward to Nubia and northeastward to Palestine and Syria.   Motivation for the pharaohs’ sponsorship of these campaigns focused on certain raw materials for which the Egyptians had more need than supply:   ivory, gold, and other precious metals in Nubia;  timber and precious stones and metals in Palestine and Syria. 

The period of the Middle Kingdom featured vigorous activity of many sorts:  A large-scale reclamation and irrigation project in the area of Fayum increased Egypt’s supply of food;  the development of the cuneiform writing system increase the efficiency of scribes in recording governmental decrees, religious events, and commercial transactions.  The creations of Egyptian statuary and jewelry conveyed a sense of the wide geographical universe inhabited by the Egyptians, whose artists and artisans used numerous materials of foreign origin.

By 1786, processes pf late dynastic decline set in, and Egyptian history entered the Second Intermediate Period, for the last half of which (1674-1570  B.C. [BCE]) the technologically advanced Hyksos people stormed across Central and West Asia to enter Egypt, utilizing their chariots and iron weapons to subdue the local Egyptian population.   They constructed a new capital named Avaris and for the most part satisfied themselves with rule of Lower (northern) Egypt, probably commanding tribute from but not exerting direct control over Thebes and other southern areas traditionally under the rule of the pharaohs. 

In 1570 B. C. (BCE), the locally powerful Theban ruler, Kamose, worked with his brother (Ahmose) to conquer Avaris, expel the Hyksos from Egypt, and inaugurate the first dynasty of the New Kingdom (c 1570-1085 B. C. [BCE]).  During the rule of the New Kingdom pharaohs, Egypt reasserted itself as one of the major powers of the ancient African and Mediterranean world, stretching territorially from the Sudan to Syria, and edging close to the Nubians of the Horn of Africa, conquering them for a time and gaining direct access to their gold mines   Religious focus was directed toward Amun-Re (Amon-Ra), conjoining the chief Theban deity Amun (Amon) with the sun god Re (Ra) long worshiped throughout the land of the pharaohs. 

Notable pharaohs of Egypt during the period of the New Kingdom included Hatshepsut (r. circa 1417-1379 B. C. (BCE), one of several female pharaohs who took power during a stretch of time when the line of male heirs ran thin;  Akhenaton (Ikhnaton, 1370-1362 B. C. [BCE]), a dynamic ruler who attempted to redirect worship toward Aton, the sun’s disk, and constructed a new city named after himself (on the site of the modern Tel el Amarna);  and Ramesses (Ramses) I, II, and III---  who during the decades after1320 (when Ramses I took power) expanded to areas, such as Palestine and Nubia, typically held when the power of the Egyptian pharaohs was greatest.

The last pharaohs of the New Kingdom were not as successful as had been earlier occupants of the throne in contending with Hittites to the east, Libyans to the west, piratical “sea peoples” to the north, and Nubians to the south.  The New Kingdom fell under pressure from such outsiders, and from internal divisions, in 1085 B. C. (BCE).  During much of the 9^th and 8^th centuries B. C. (BCE), Libyans controlled Egypt, at first in the dynastic style of the pharaohs and then as an array of city-states.  The Nubians controlled Egypt for several decades after 712 B. C. (BCE) and the Assyrians asserted dominance for a while before the pharaoh Psamtik I (r. 664-610 B. C. [BCE]) established a line of native Egyptian rulers.  Then, weakened by military confrontations with the Babylonians, the Egyptians submitted to conquest by the Persians, who controlled Egypt for most of the years from 525 until 323 B. C. (BCE).

In 323 B. C. (BCE), the forces of Alexander the Great smashed their way into Egypt to establish  the magnificent city of Alexandria and reorient Egyptian civilization towards that rich blend of Greek, Roman, and Arab influences known as Hellenistic civilization.  Then, some ten centuries later (7^th century A. D. [CE]), another great invading force---  that of the Muslims---  reoriented Egyptian civilization once again, the Muslims were hugely important  for their intellectual prowess in incorporating the scholarly, literary,  and artistic works of Graeco-Roman civilization into a cultural realm that was dominated religiously by Islam.  

Kush, Meroe, and Axum

Under pressure from the Assyrians, the Nubian pharaoh Taharqa retreated southward in the 7th century B. C. (BCE) to Kush, where the Nubians (Kushites) mastered the iron-making skills learned from the Assyrians and built a stable and prosperous kingdom focused at the Fourth Cataract, in the great “S” bend of the Nile, and eastward into the regions that we today know as Ethiopia and Somalia.  This land at the time was very fertile and able to support large herds of cattle;  by the 6^th century B. C. (BCE), the borders of Kush stretched to the south of present-day Khartoum.


As years of grazing depleted the soil, the people of Kush trended toward Meroe, south of the Atbara River’s confluence with the Nile.  The great state of Meroe had abundant resources in iron ore and the wood necessary to smelt it;  heaps of slag that to this day appear across this land bear witness to the thriving iron industry of Meroe.  Protected by a well-armed cavalry, traders of Meroe exchanged goods with counterparts in Egypt, Arabia, and India.  The empire’s artists and artisans blended influences from Egypt, the Hellenistic world, and India to produce works stunning in their adaptation of these diverse styles to themes appropriate to the geographical setting of Meroe.

Desiccation of the land induced a decline in the wealth and military might of Meroe, which left the land vulnerable to an attack from nearby Axum in 350 A. D. (CE).  Here the mostly black Africans of Meroe blended with a population that had in the 7^th century B. C. (BCE) migrated from today’s Yemen across the Red Sea to the Horn of Africa.  The Axumite court was stage for ethnically diverse representatives from West Asian and the Mediterranean, bringing Hellenistic, Greek Orthodox, Arabian, Persian, and Indian influences.  The Muslim conquest of the Arabian peninsula and then Egypt disrupted the sea trade on which much of Axum’s power and prosperity had depended, precipitating a decline.  But from time to time the Axumite society reasserted the cultural greatness of the days of glory, and particularly during the medieval era underwent a renaissance.  The modern urban center of Axum is the holy city of the Coptic Christians.    

Great West African Empires

In the 8^th century there arose in West Africa the first of three great empires that would for many centuries dominate the Sudan, the region south of the Sahara Desert and north of the tropical forests running from Senegal in the west to the Nile valley in the east.  This first of the three great West African empires was Ghana, which initially consolidated power among their own people, the Soninke, then asserting power over a strong and dynamic trading state stretching between the Senegal and Upper Niger Rivers.  Ghanaian traders bartered for gold with traders who lived intermediately between themselves and the gold miners who lived and labored to the far south.  The Ghanaians then sold the gold to merchants who crossed the desert and gathered in the southernmost oases at the northern edge of the Sudan and served as terminal points for caravans that gained fame for their journeys across the Sahara.


During 1076-1077 A. D. (CE) the Almoravids (a fierce Berber nomad configuration that typically guided trade caravans across the desert) broke out of the western Sahara desert to lead a holy war northward through Morocco and all the way to Spain (where they conquered the Umayyad Moors);  and southward to lands that included the Ghanaian empire.  Several smaller kingdoms survived the Almoravid invasion, among which was the well-organized petty kingdom of Mal.  Under the rule of three dynamic rulers---  Sundiata, Mansa Uli, and Mansa Musa---   Mali expanded in the course of 1220-1340 A. D. (CE)  to occupy an area in West Africa larger than had Ghana.  Ghana covered much of the western Sudan and featured one of the world’s most opulent and cultured cities, Timbuktu.   Sundiata, Mansa Ul, and Mansa Musa embraced Islam, which had become such a powerful cultural force throughout West Asia, North Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and into stretches of West and Central Africa.  In 1324, Mansa Musa made a pilgrimage to Mecca, carrying with him and spending so much gold in route that he upset the money market in Cairo and caused an inflationary period to ensue in the trade of the Mediterranean area that lasted for decades thereafter.

Mali continued strong until about 1450, at which time Songhai, the wealthiest and most powerful of these great West African empires, established rule over the region.  For at least a century and a half, Songhai featured one of the world’s greatest civilizations.  The heart of the empire nwas at about the midpoint alog the Niger River, where the kind of trade that had made Ghana and Mali such formidable forces in West Africa continued to flourish.  Songhai reached its height during the rule of Sonny Ali (r. 1464-1492) and Askia the Great (r. 1493-1528).  Urban life thrived on the basis of the region’s commercial vitality and on the elements of high civilization found in Islamic law, medicine, math, science, literature, architecture, art, and theology.  Djenne was on great city of Songhai.  Timbuktu was even greater.  To this latter scholars came from all over western Asia and Africa to exchange ideas, just as merchants exchanged goods and services.  Songhai’s great mosque of Sankore provided a fertile meeting ground for Muslim thinkers and people of all faith endeavoring to visit one of the world’s most important urban centers.  The mosque of Sankore represented a cultural continuity between the empires of Mali and Songhai, having been designed in the 14^th century by As-Saheli, one of the Egyptians brought back to Mali by Mansa Musa after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324.

Other Kingdoms and Societies of Africa 

To the east of Songhai lay the Hausa states, including the notable Kano and Katsina, the development of which seems to have extended back into the 11^th century.  Bu the 14^th century, powerful kings ruled these domains, which feature substantial urban centers where craftspeople and merchants built prosperous livelihoods connected to the regional and trans-desert trade.  The Hausa states were particularly famous for their leatherwork, which yielded much sought-after items from the North;  European traders obtained these leather goods in the journeys to North African and came to them collectively as Moroccan leather.

In the central Sudan, around Lake Chad, lay another great state, Kanem-Bornu, the rulers of which had been Muslin from as early as the 11^th century.  One of the oldest and largest of the African states, Kanem-Bornu retained its independent existence until the latter years of the 19^th century, when European traders finally succeeded in bringing it under control. 

In the mountains toward the eastern end of the Sudanic belt lay Ethiopia, a Christian empire that was the successor state to Axum.   Monarchical states made a later appearance south of the Sudan, but empies such as the Benin and the Oro in Yorubaland (Nigeria), whose people produced some of the world’s great sculptures, flourished well before the arrival of the Europeans in the 15^th century.  African peoples in other part of the continent also established kingdoms and empoires, especially in the expansive territory south of the equator into which the Bantu language had spread.    

Over several millennia, a cluster of kingdoms flourished between the great lakes of East Africa, including Rwanda and Buganda.  South of the Congo (Zaire) forests lived the peoples of the Luba-Lunda group of kingdoms, and the monarchical state of Kongo emerged as a dominant force south of the river estuary that in colonial times (from the late 19^th century) would bear its name.

Much farther to the South, on the Zimbabwe-Rhodesian plateau, was the empire of Monomotapa, the wealth of which was derived from a lucrative trade in gold on the East African coast at sofala, a coastal outpost of the rich trading city of Kilwa.  Associated with this kingdom of Monomotapa was the Great Zimbabwe, a walled enclosure built mainly in  the 14^th and 15^th centuries n a site that ahd been used for ritual purpose since 1000 A. D. (CE).


General Characteristics of African Societies

Throughout these magnificent kingdoms and in those areas where a more decentralized style of governance prevailed, a wide variety of cultural styles described the lives of Africans.  West Africans were known for their skill as farmers and Artists.  They excelled in cultivating rice, building boats, and navigating along coasts.  Many were experts in producing textiles and baskets.  Others fashioned clothing from skins and fur.  Some became expert in producing weapons, utensils, and ceremonial objects from iron, copper, and precious stones.  Heights of artistry were reached by many West Africans who used these same materials to produce jewelry, metalwork, and sculpture.


The topography of Africa was and is enormously varied, featuring tropical forests, expansive deserts, and broad grassland.  Many African societies are matrilineal, with inheritance and property rights descended from the mother.  Many are also matrilocal, meaning that it is the groom who leaves his own family t live with or near the family of the bride.  Kinship was very important in traditional African society.  Ancestors are considered the links to the past, and descendants were considered the bridge to the future.  Both were part of the family broadly construed.  Typically hundreds of family members, including people of several generations, gathered together in clan associations to conduct common business and to maintain religious rituals preserving the lint to those who had lived before.

People in West African traditionally worshiped their ancestors, seen as the vital link between the supreme creator and the people of humankind and nature.  The indigenous religions of West Africa are animistic:  worshipers devote their ceremonies and ritual observations to spirits believed to dwell in animals, forests, rivers, and rocks.  Nature was and is seen as a thing worthy of respect, awe, care and caution.

The Enduring Legacy of Africa for African-Americans


The arrival of Europeans in the 15^th century would eventually alter the course of African history in ways that would be important not only to the people of the vast continent, but for the entire world, as well.  Later, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, almost all of Africa would come under the control of

European colonial powers which exerted a might based on superior military hardware and oceangoing prowess.  More immediately important to the history of people of African origin in the Americas would be the slave trade that developed from the fifteenth century, following a pattern of commercial  interaction that included participants of four continents:  Africa, South America, North America, and Europe. 

Those people of African descent who were torn from their homeland came with a rich store of cultural treasure that people of European descent could not wrench from their brains, no matter how disrespectfully the slave traders abused African bodies.  The cultures of Africa, alive in the brains and bodies of those people brought to the American from Africa as slaves, would be one of the major cultural streams enriching the lives of people from the Western Hemisphere, including the United States.

Abominable Ignorance of the Citizenry Is the Greatest National Crisis on Fourth of July 2020

On this strange and challenging Fourth of July I sit for a moment in the splendid site in the universe that is my study, remembering one of the first passages upon which I exercised my lifelong propensity for memorization of inspiring and eloquent written expression  >>>>>

 

>>>>> 

 

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth that separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

 

We hold these truths to be self-evident:  That all men are created equal;  that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;  that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

 

That to secure these liberties, governments are instituted by men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed;  that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive until these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness…..

 

Thirteen years later, the form for “organizing its powers” to which Thomas Jefferson referred in that brilliant beginning (and in wordage nearly 25%) of the Declaration of Independence was strongly suggested in the Preamble penned by James Madison in his even more brilliant Constitution of the United States of America, also memorized and in this case referenced in the oration that I delivered in speech contests:

 

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the general welfare, and secure these blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this CONSTITUTION for the United States of America

 

On this day in 2020, 144 years after the Declaration of Independence was promulgated, and 131 years after the Constitution, the power of those documents is strongly suggested by what I assert is very little need for change in the wording or the principles.  As a feminist, I would change “mankind” to humankind and “men” to people (and as another indication of the brilliance of the document, we could do so by amendment), and I would be fine with changing references to Divinity to Nature instead;  as a leftist, nothing else in the Declaration and nothing at all in the Preamble, would I change.

 

After his verbally rollicking beginning, Jefferson continues to rollick with a long list of abuses by King King George, a review of what the colonists had done to try to avoid the break, then to make the break with the declaration that “these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states.”

 

Only at one place in the Declaration would Jefferson betray his own perfections and those of his times, that point at which among his verbal bombs launched at George he writes

 

He has excited domestic insurrection among us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known role of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions,

 

thus ironically presaging the approach that the nation would take for the “undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions” pertinent to the people assigned the epithet properly assigned to those who perpetrated the 1930 Indian Removal Act and the 1887 Dawes Act.   

 

Tom, for all of his brilliance, gave part of himself away on that one.

 

As to  Madison, his mostly brilliant luster dimmed most abjectly in excluding “Indians not taxed” and “three-fifths” of all other persons, those latter constituting that majority of African Americans who could not be counted part of the “whole number of free persons.”

 

Very complex and at times virulently flawed, these idealists who created the world’s most diverse prototype for contemporary democracy.

 

…………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

These reflections lead me to assert that in the now quite un-United States of 4 July 2020 we are mired not in two but three national crises:

 

1      >>>>>>          the health threat posed by and national policy related to COVID-19

 

2      >>>>>>          issues raised by the murder of George Floyd

 

3      >>>>>>          woeful ignorance, vitiating responses to the two other crises

 

…………………………………………………………………………………………

 

History and historical personages are complex.

 

Whatever the truth about the immorality of the character, the war, and the lifestyle represented by  of the people formerly celebrated with statues, the foundations of those sculpted testimonies to human imperfection were surely sturdier than the knowledge base of most of those doing the

ripping---  and most of those not inclined to rip are at least as ignorant.

 

Very hard it is to have a national discussion about the events and people of history in the absence of one whit of knowledge about the events and people history.

 

………………………………………………………………………………..

 

I wonder what will happen if the rippers and the erasers turn their attention to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

 

Methinks that there are few visual recognitions of James Madison to be ripped asunder;  and in perfect irony, Madison is at once the foremost architect of national democracy who ever breathed and mostly unknown as to his brilliance and accomplishment by the American public.  Those who named the capital of Wisconsin must have had some idea, but most of the current residents of the city most likely do not.  And most of the national citizenry could not even cite the capital of Wisconsin or its 49 companions across land and sea.

 

By contrast, there is quite a bit of visual testimony to Jefferson, and many a name.   

 

Given that 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,”

 

what will we do with that? 

 

Does the citizenry even know enough to feel as it should a wrenching cognitive dissonance?

 

What will be ripped up and cast asunder?

 

More importantly, will such an ignorant citizenry as ours have any idea at all as to what to create in the absence of the values and the system implicitly or explicitly debased as the symbols are un-based?

 

I’ll watch with a certain agony as destruction exceeds capacity for construction.

 

But as a leftist activist for overhauled K-12 education, I am busy now and will be for many moons doing what I can to put ideas before a citizenry that I intend to make knowledgeable enough to understand as I do my own ripping asunder---   of the current ideological framework of the Minneapolis Public Schools. 

 

Front Matter and Contents >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota >>>>> Volume VI, Number 1

Volume VII, No. 1                                          

July 2020

 

Journal of the K-12 Revolution

Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota        

                                                                                

A Five-Article Series         

 

A Publication of the New Salem Educational Initiative

 

Gary Marvin Davison, Editor

                               

 

Culpability of MPS Decision-Makers

For the Murder of George Floyd

 

A Five-Article Series         

 

Gary Marvin Davison, Ph. D.

Director, New Salem Educational Initiative

 

New Salem Educational Initiative

Minneapolis, Minnesota

               

Culpability of MPS Decision-Makers

For the Murder of George Floyd

 

A Five-Article Series         

 

Copyright © 2020 by Gary Marvin Davison

New Salem Educational Initiative

 

Contents

 

Introductory Comments:                                                                                                                                                                                               

Article #1          

Culpability of MPS Decision-Makers

For the Murder of George Floyd                    

 

Article #2         

The Failure of MPS Decision-Makers to Be Adults 

 >>>>> 

The Need for the Articulation of Moral Values

 

Article #3          

MPS Decision-Makers and Chiefs of Key

Divisions and Departments Must Understand

How We Got in this Pre-12 Education Mess

 

Article #4         

Why Ibrahima Diop, Karen Devet, Fadi Fadhil

(and Now Justin Hennes), Rochelle Cox, and

Maggie Sullivan are So Much Better at What

They Do Than Are Ed Graff, Aimee Fearing,

and the Entire Staff of the MPS Department

of Teaching and Learning

 

Article #5         

 

Superintendent Ed Graff’s Cabinet Must Advocate for the Dismissal of Interim Senior Academic Officer Aimee Fearing, Dismantlement of the Department of Teaching and Learning, and the Ouster of Graff Himself if He Does Not Hire Academicians Capable of Designing Knowledge-Intensive Curriculum 

Introduction >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota >>>>> Volume VI, Number 1

Introductory Comments

 

Human moral standards vary over time and are still a work in progress.

 

Political and social arrangements follow the prevailing moral ethos at a particular time in history.

 

Until the late 17th century, monarchical rule, including the expanded imperial form of hereditary governance, prevailed over much of the globe.  Simpler village, village cluster, and clan organization characterized other societies in islands of the great oceans and in areas that remained remote from global interaction and competition;  but these societies, too, became swept up in imperial systems as political entities of formidable military power took aim at peoples previously living distantly from the interacting world.   

 

Britain’s dramatic national ruckus of 1688-1689, dubbed the “Glorious Revolution,” brought enhanced power to Parliament and thenceforth asserted the advantages of limiting monarchical power.  John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government served as theoretical inspiration for that power shift;  in the 18^th century, Montesquieu would posit the advantages of three-branch governance, with a judiciary positioned equally alongside executive and legislative bodies.

 

In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson maintained Locke’s idea of “life” and “liberty” as natural rights while changing “property” to “the pursuit of happiness.”  In the United States Constitution, James Madison also wrote under the inspiration of Locke and incorporated Montesquieu’s three-branch organizational principal, with a central government much more powerful than had been the case with the ephemeral Articles of Confederation but nevertheless conferring notable prerogatives on state and local governments, and on the “people.”

 

But composition of the “people” was only very slowly expansive:   

 

Jefferson and Madison were guilty and ideologically conflicted slave-owners who for pecuniary reasons lived with their guilt.  Andrew Jackson was a slaveholding abuser of Native Americans who nevertheless expanded the electorate to include white men of humble means.  These imperfect promoters of democracy created a system that by 1865-1877 was capable of including men of all ethnicities as formal citizens;  but territorial acquisition and political compromise negated the value of the formality, so that not for another century would a judicial, executive, and legislative consensus form that Native Americans, African Americans, and white women should gain full human dignity, with legal recourse when traditional societal attitudes conflicted with statutory and constitutional law.

 

Those traditional attitudes, including those of particular racial and sexist virulence, had major moments of reassertion from the 1980s into this very year of 2020.  Of a sudden, though, abuse of people according to ethnic and gender identification seems no longer acceptable to a majority of the now greatly expanded citizenry.

 

But a tenacious minority clings to prejudice as a guiding principle for life and will not fade in the absence of an effective combination of persuasive and punitive measures.

 

Both those who have embraced the expanded notion of citizenship and those maintaining reactionary stances mostly dwell in abject ignorance as to history, government, and natural science.

 

Only the overhaul of K-12 education can maximize the possibility that social and political advancement can proceed so that persuasive measures exceed punitive, and so that the future may be envisioned on the basis of fact and shared ethics, rather on the ethos of illogic and moral morass describing our national condition in 2020.

 

The needed overhaul must begin at the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

For that to happen, fundamentally good people are going to have to behave better.

 

To behave better, leaders at the Minneapolis Public Schools are going to have to discover heretofore untapped sources of courage and action.

 

This July 2020 edition of Journal of the K-12 Revolution shows these good people the root of the dilemma and the route to the sources.                  

 

Article #1 >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota >>>>> Volume VI, Number 1

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 18^th and early 19^th centuries;  the long tenure of that institution on the international stage waned as the 19^th 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.

Article #2 >>>>> Journal of the K-12 Revolution: Essays and Research from Minneapolis, Minnesota >>>>> Volume VI, Number 1

Article #2 

The Failure of MPS Decision-Makers to Be Adults  >>>>> 

The Need for the Articulation of Moral Values

 

Among the many sins of decision-makers at the Minneapolis Public Schools is the failure to be adults.

 

Adults accept responsibility for guiding youth academically and morally. 

 

In the Introduction to this series as you scroll on down the blog, I summarize what is necessary to overhaul curriculum for knowledge intensity, consonant with the core message in these articles that failure to create a knowledgeable citizenry establishes the dangerous context for the murder of George Floyd.  The key message of this article is that locally centralized schools systems have also failed in the responsibility to articulate moral values.

Families serve as the first conveyor of moral values to children.  Freud called the part of the personality that carries these initially parental moral messages the “superego.”  At best, the superego instills transcendent empathy and altruistic inclination on the part of the evolving child, with the possibility that parental instruction can also be powerfully supplemented by friends and other people and situations in the moral environment.   And behaviorist B. F. Skinner would say that ultimately the ever-developing person is only as morally good as her or his environment induces the person to be.

 

The school experience provides the other, in many ways more important, conveyor of values to students.  Moral values will be transmitted either tacitly or explicitly.  As it is, conveyance tends to be tacit, since decision-makers in locally centralized school systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools fail to take a forceful stand either as to curriculum or moral values.  The putatively “progressive” approach to education that originated at Teachers College of Columbia University in the 1920s and insidiously took hold from the 1970s forward to this very year of 2020 exalted the child’s own ability to create the education appropriate to her or him upon activation of personal interest.

All of the key supplemental intellectual detritus spewed forth by those campus lightweights given the undeserved appellation of education “professor” followed from this view of the child and of education.  By the 1990s, the self-esteem movement produced classroom presences who did very little teaching but often showered children of highly variable academic accomplishment with praise inappropriate to school performance or classroom behavior.  Thus, decision-makers and teacher at MPS and other locally centralized systems failed dually: 

(Non-)educators in preK-12 systems not only failed to provide the precious young people under their responsibility with a substantive education;  just as corruptly, they failed to convey a firm code of ethics:

Administrators and teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools have failed in their adult responsibilities to develop youth either morally or intellectually.

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Ironically, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), as moral instruction is called by the organization known as CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning), is avowedly the driving force at the Minneapolis Public Schools as led by Superintendent Ed Graff.  But Graff is not only an academic lightweight;  he is also reprehensible in not even following through with promulgation of SEL tenets:  Many an administrator and teacher in the system will testify as to the neglect of any vigorous explanation of those tenets or effort to implement the formulation’s five key emphases:  self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.

Four years into the tenure of Ed Graff as MPS superintendent, the district’s students continue to suffer from both a vacuous academic program and the lack of ethical instruction.  Social and Emotional Learning not only could not ever serve as the driver of academic advancement;  the formulation, while advocating the development of desirable personal qualities, is vague as to any code of ethics.

 

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Administrators and teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools have poor grasp of the world’s great religious and ethical systems.  They should be about learning these post-haste.  Study of these systems would serve as guide to the code of ethics to be imparted to the students whose moral and academic instruction they are bound to serve as sacred duty.

 

Judaism represents a grand struggle over millennia to understand the Divine, find purpose, and act ethically.

Hinduism conveys a sense of the fragility and impermanence of terrestrial life and the imperative to end the necessity of multiple earthly sojourns by achieving an elevated understanding of Truth.

 

Buddhism focuses relentlessly on the problem of ego, human striving, and unceasing desire---  and the necessity in the moral life to move from selfish concerns to compassionate thought and action for the benefit of all sentient beings.

Christianity stresses the power of Divine Love active in the world.

Islam emphasizes avoidance of idolatrous distractions for focus on the one Supreme Divinity.   

And animistic belief systems focus on the ubiquity of Divinity in Nature.

From these great world systems of belief, thoughtful adults should be able to communicate to young people of various cultures and ethnicities a system of values that emphasizes

 

>>>>>  the paramount imperative to Love one’s fellow human beings;

>>>>>  the moral duty to act upon that Love with compassion for all humankind;

 

>>>>>  rejection of violence in favor conflict resolution through mutual understanding;

 

>>>>>  identification of none’s own good with the good of all humankind;

>>>>>  acknowledgement of the biological imperative to satisfy material needs but to recognize that Meaning is found only in empathetic understanding and beneficent action.

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Failure of administrators and teachers at the Minneapolis Public Schools to model ethical conduct and convey a clear set of moral values both represents and promotes the failure of our society to do the same.

And a society without a common set of public ethics creates the circumstances whereby George Floyd and others are robbed of both life and Life.

George Floyd was murdered because physically grown people have failed to be adults.