Page 12 The Broncos' Voice October, 1991
Experiences With Miseducation
Albert Johnson
The most important source of
knowledge that anyone can receive in
life is an education. There is no way to
stress how valuable an education is.
Without one, it is almost impossible to
be truly successful. That is why
miseducation has hurt black men. I, as a
black man, have experienced
miseducation in the public school
system.
When I went to grade school, I
always kept up good grades and hardly
ever got into trouble. I was a shy kid
with little self-confidence or pride. I had
a lot of honor courses in junior high
school, but in the 9th grade, I
surrendered most of those because 1 felt
I couldn’t read well enough to keep up
with the work.
I was never into reading books,
because I felt you could watch the same
junk on television. I just couldn’t
identify with novels I was assigned to
read. The curriculum was composed of
European literature and 1 found it
difficult for me to concentrate on what
I was reading. I had a hard time writing
stories in my English classes because I
couldn’t think of anything relevant to
me in the assigned readings.
My history classes were also
very Eurocentric. The only black histwy
that I knew was slavery and Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. I did leam that Africa
was colonized by Europe, but it seemed
that Europe was the most civilized
continent in the world, and they came to
other continents in order to spread
civihzation. Although I learned some
things about civil rights leaders and
black inventors, I still appeared lost
because 1 had no real understanding of
how blacks were relevant to history.
I began to notice that some of
my favorite artists like Boogie Down
Productions and Public Enemy mention
a lot of black history in their music. 1
was amazed yet ignorant of what they
were rapping. For example, the Boogie
Down Productions’ song "You Must
Leam" mentions how blacks were
responsible for great inventions such as
the walkie talkie and traffic lights. This
left me thinking, "Really? They did?"
Part of Public Enemy’s song "Welcome
to the Terrordome" mentions the
shooting of Huey Newton, I began
wandering, "Who was Huey Newton?"!
wanted to relate to the things these rap
artists were mentioning.
So, I figured that the only way
to gain the knowledge was to start
reading books. The first books that I
started reading were on black history.
Reading was never a hobby of mine, but
that began to change when I discovered
some history that I never knew could be
possible. I became glued to reading
books. I started reading everyday, in my
spare time at school and 1 even read
when 1 walked home from school. I
discovered that I liked going to the
library and reading good books.
Some of the black history that
I discovered gave me a new feeling of
pride and self confidence. I discovered:
* The shoes I wear are manufactured by
a machine invented by a black man
named Jan Matzeliger.
* The person who invented the blood
bank system, Charles Drew, was black.
* One of the 5 people who first necfe
it to the North Pole, Matthew Henson,
was black.
I discovered that blacks could made
great contributions to this country and
but did not get credit for them.
I discovered that Malcolm X
was a great leader. When 1 first started
reading about him, I was blown away
because I had never heard a black leader
call white people "devils" and the
"wolf. He was a very militant and
effective revolutionary. He expressed
black nationalism and self-defense
which are ideas of which I had no
knowledge.
As 1 continued to read more of
and about Malcolm X, my thinking
gradually began to change. My thoughts
about whites, blacks, people, goals,
government, politics, history, etc. went
through a complete metamorphosis. I
was developing a sense of pride, dignity,
wisdom, identity, and understanding that
I never knew could be found. My
mentality became very strong and
militant.
After reading about Malcolm
X, I was inspired to read the literature
and history of many great leaders like
Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark
Vesey, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey,
Elijah Muhammad, Adam Clayton
Powell, Angela Davis, Stokely
Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Eldridge
Cleaver, Frederick Douglas, and the list
goes on and on. And yes, I now know
who Huey P. Newton was. He was
Minister of Defense and co-founder of
the Black Panther Party in 1966 along
with Chairman Bobby G. Seale.
It’s too bad that I couldn’t leam
about my culture and the conditions of
blacks in the public school system. No
history or English class ever taught me
any knowledge of myself. In a few
ways, I feel like I’ve learned more
wisdom in one year than I leamed in 12
years at public institutions. Teachers are
supposed to be our guides in learning,
but I had to teach myself black history.
Textbooks never taught me
enough about history either. For
example, there was only one sentence in
my U.S. history book about the Black
Panthers. That makes me wonder. Are
these books hiding and distorting history
because it’s too dangerous, or is it done
to keep wisdom enslaved in the
European power structure? I’ve always
known that blacks can do anything they
put their minds to, but if I didn’t know
that blacks in past history have
established great power bases and have
continued to express black nationalism,
then my only goal today would be to
assimilate into the white man’s society.
It’s been said, "If you don’t
know your past, then you don’t know
your future. Miseducation among blacks
must stop if the conditions of black
people are going to get better. Blacks
must be taught a proper education, one
that teaches them about themselves. The
current school system isn’t doing that,
and it’s leaving the black mind
enslaved. If there is ever going to be
pride and unity among blacks, then we
need education not miseducation.
- Albert Johnson
Education From Page 8
The aim of multicultural
education is for history, literature, art
and music to begin to reflect the various
cultures and ethnic groups that populate
this country and the rest of the world
and for these topics to reflect the
contributions the males and females of
these groups have made to the
enrichment of the United States and
world as a whole.
Maybe the opposition has
simply failed to take a look at the
demographics of America and the reia
of the globe. The world is not the
domain of white heterosexual males. It
never was their domain, but they surely -
treated it as such.
White, feminist scholar Barbara
Ehrenreich has written about the
extensive damage that this monocultural
education has rendered;
"American history, as it was taught to
us, began with Columbus’ "discovery" of
an apparently unpeopled America, and
moved on to the Pilgrims serving
pumpkin pie to a handful of grateful
red-skinned folks. College expanded our
horizons with courses called
Humanities....Graduate students wrote
dissertations on what long-dead men
though of Chaucer’s verse or
Shakespeare’s drama; foreign languages
meant French or German. If there had
been high technology in China,
kingdoms in black Africa or women
anywhere, at any time, doing anything
worth noticing, we did not know it, nor
did anyone think to tell us."
The fact is, many people in educational
settings are led to believe that every
idea, concept, political movement and
other important functions of the world
were carried out by white people alone.
Women simply bred the men and
blacks, once released from slavery,
provided the entertainment Beyond this,
no one else existed and the existence of
Blacks and women was simply an
irrelevant footnote.
A multicultural education is
many things; it is not just the addition
of Black, Women’s and Gay Studies
Departments on university campuses.
Multicultural education is the ability to
empathize in ways that the vanguard of
multiculturalism, the politically correct,
are not willing to empathize. (More
about this in succeeding article)
Multicultural education does not
automatically become a fact simply
because the classes exist that will teach
the cultures of others. The ultimate aim
of multiculturalism is to be able to
incorporate the achievements and
contributions of America’s various
groups into American history, art and
literature courses.
Multiculturalism stresses the
importance of becoming educated in a
diverse, well-rounded perspective that
emphasizes truth. Barbara Ehrenreich’s
education is surely as short-sighted and
narrow as that of the "I-only-read-afro-
centnc-books" race man. Shelby Steele,
a professor at San Jose State University
and a controversial figure among the
Black academia, laments,
"One of the saddest things I see is Black
students who say to me, "I only read
Black writers." And what they really
mean is they are reading people like
Don L. Lee and Louis Farrakhan. I say;
Have you ever read any Jean-Paul
Satre? Have you ever read any Ralph
Ellison or Albert Murray or James
Baldwin? ....There’s this sort of
intellectual segregation that I think is
absolutely a death knell for our future."
When students are finally fortunate
enough to be taught the Middle Passage,
one can only hope that it will not be the
patronizing "Africans were wonderful
people until the white man came along"
variety. The history of European
expansion and colonization of Africa
must also include the fact that Africans
were actively involved in the slave trade
as well. Without these truths, the
African experience will become as
pathetic as the ’noble savage’ theory
that liberal whites have applied to the
Native American experience.
Education continued on p. 17