Public education struggles rooted in anti-racist legacy
By
Stephen Millies
Published Jul 14, 2011 10:45 PM
It took a struggle
to win the right
to learn to read.
Illiteracy is a tool
of oppression
used to deprive
people of basic
rights.
|
The right to education is under attack across the United States.
The American Association of School Administrators estimated “227,000
education jobs are on the chopping block for the 2011-2012 school
year.”
College has become even more expensive. Since 2007 the University of
Arizona’s tuition has doubled. It has increased by 40 percent at the
University of California since the 2008-2009 school year. Racist Georgia
politicians have prohibited undocumented immigrants from attending state
colleges.
Taking advantage of Hurricane Katrina, and the horrible damage caused in New
Orleans, government officials have privatized most schools there and turned
them into charter schools.
The wealthy and powerful have declared war on public education. Billionaires
aim to privatize schools under the name of “education reform.”
Teachers are their first target.
One “education reformer” is Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who
according to Forbes magazine is worth $56 billion. That’s almost twice
the gross domestic product of Ghana’s 24.8 million people.
William Henry Gates III attended Seattle’s private Lakeside School with a
tiny pupil-to-teacher ratio. But he doesn’t think class sizes of 35
students or more are a problem. Gates urged school administrations to
“[identify] the top 25 percent of teachers and [ask] them to take on four
or five more students.” (Washington Post, Feb. 28)
This is just like factory owners demanding employees operate more machines or
hospital administrators ordering nurses to care for more patients. Bosses
always push workers to produce more at less pay. Teachers are workers, too.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent $373 million on education in 2009;
$73 million was for “advocacy.” This “advocacy” was
really anti-union propaganda and lobbying. It helped finance “Teach
Plus,” which got supposedly rank-and-file teachers to testify in Indiana
and other states in favor of eliminating union protection as a way to stop
layoffs — a lose-lose proposition. (New York Times, May 21)
Abolitionists fought for public schools
The struggle for public education in the U.S. was linked to the struggle
against slavery.
It was a death penalty offense in most Southern states to teach enslaved people
to read and write. The slave masters viewed literacy as dangerous as handing
out weapons on a plantation.
Horace Mann was an abolitionist congressperson from Massachusetts who is often
credited with establishing the state’s public school system.
The Horace Mann School in the wealthy Riverdale section of the Bronx defames
this anti-slavery leader’s memory by charging yearly tuition of $37,275.
Real education reform means fighting for South Bronx students to attend this
exclusive prep school.
Thaddeus Stevens fought almost single- handedly in the 1830s to defend and
build Pennsylvania public schools. Racists still hate him for his support in
Congress for Black freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction. As Ways and
Means Committee chairperson, he demanded arms and the right to vote for
enslaved people. He also urged the break-up of plantations and giving the land
to formerly enslaved people and poor whites.
Black struggle for schools in U.S.
Black people had to fight for centuries to get into U.S. schools. When the
African Free School was established in 1787, it may have been the first free
school in New York not tied to a church. Three formerly enslaved people opened
the first school for Black students in Washington, D.C., in 1807.
Racists attacked northern Black schools. In 1833, racists in Canterbury, Conn.,
tried to burn a school for African Americans. Two years later, a white mob used
oxen to drag a Black school into a swamp outside Canaan, N.H.
By the start of the Civil War, there were 32,692 African-American students
enrolled across the country. Black churches had formed Wilberforce University
in Ohio, explains Lerone Bennett Jr. in his historic work, “Before the
Mayflower: A History of Black America.”
Formerly enslaved individuals built schools and hoped that teachers would come.
Black parents in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore struggled to establish high
schools named after the great poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Among the Black institutions founded was Langston College in Oklahoma. It was
named after John Mercer Langston, who was Ohio’s first African-American
lawyer and Virginia’s first Black congressperson. He was Langston
Hughes’ great-uncle.
How can this history mean anything to Gates? Microsoft has a record of
discriminatory hiring practices. It took a civil rights lawsuit to reveal that
just 2.6 percent of Microsoft’s 21,429 employees in 1999 were African
American. (http://www.faceintel.com/relatedclassactions.htm)
Billionaires need skilled workers, but they’re afraid of poor and working
people who get an education. Their attitude is like that of Prussian serf-owner
“Frederick the Great” more than 200 years ago, “If my
soldiers were to begin to think, not one would remain in the
ranks.”
Education in socialist Cuba
Colonial regimes are among the worst examples. After 300 years of Dutch rule in
the early 1900s, there were just 70 college graduates in Indonesia.
“Illiterates with the right attitude to manual employment are preferable
to products of the schools,” declared Kenya’s British rulers in
1949, when three Kenyan high schools admitted only 100 African students
annually.
Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba was barred from college and forced to take
correspondence courses. His assassination on Jan. 17, 1961, was ordered by
President Dwight Eisenhower. (Guardian, Aug. 20, 2000)
The Russian and Chinese Revolutions, and the liberation struggles that swept
the planet, finally opened up some school doors. African students were allowed
to attend U.S. colleges in hopes they wouldn’t enroll in Patrice Lumumba
University in the socialist Soviet Union.
The first battle of the Cuban Revolution was to wipe out illiteracy. Conrado
Benítez García, a Black teacher, was lynched by CIA-backed
counterrevolutionaries for teaching peasants to read and write.
After the Soviet Union’s overthrow in 1991, Cuba lost most of its foreign
trade. Despite this tremendous economic blow, not a single Cuban school was
closed. Cuba saved its schools because of socialist economic planning. Today
its Latin American School of Medicine trains thousands of doctors from around
the world, including from poor U.S. communities.
Cuba has what we need.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email:
[email protected]
Subscribe
[email protected]
Support independent news
DONATE