Showing posts with label Dr. Benjamin Rush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dr. Benjamin Rush. Show all posts

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Government Schools and Concentration Camps, I mean Classes

Now I want to make one thing clear. As a child I attended school. With that being said, I was educated at home. I say this because many of us do not or cannot see the difference between school and education. Schooling is just that, sending kids to a building where they will unnaturally be around people their own age, learning to be instructed in whatever the system operating the school desires to be taught.

Me, I was reading before first grade, learned addition, subtraction, division, fractions and square roots all at home. Not to mention I learned every type of rock, plant, animal and chemical there was – all at home and prior to any formal government school instruction. I call it government schools because that is what my folks used to call it. They made it clear that the government public schools (at least in the 1960s) didn’t really want to teach African Americans anything of value. So it was common place to learn at home and hope the school supplemented that lesson. Those days are gone and now we have forgotten the mandates of government public schools – to do the bid of the state. Regardless if that means suspending African America males disproportionately to other races, sending students into severely overcrowded class rooms, and graduating a population with a high school degree but 80 percent of the graduates can’t read or do math on a functional grade level when in college.

Even as a kid (and yes I read Hegel at age eleven), I understood the Hegelian Dialectic or "Consensus Process." Simply put it is plain old brainwashing. To quote William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education 1889-1906 (1835-1909), “Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role.” But what could be expected, the political father of the modern day public government education system was Woodrow Wilson. As then president of Princeton and addressing the Federation of High School teachers he stated: 'We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks,' thus designing a school system that would prevent 'the masses' from learning anything liberating when they got there. Even the courts assert such. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in its Palmdale School District opinion, November 2, 2005 read: a “parents…”fundamental right to control the education of their children is, at the least, substantially diminished. The constitution does not vest parents with the authority to interfere with a public school decision as to how it will provide information to its students or what information it will provide, in its classrooms or otherwise [See Yoder, 406 U.S. at 205].

The reality is that with a closed educational system we will never have an open political system. But politicians and leading educators in history didn’t hide this fact. It was John D. Rockefeller, whose family ironically founded the National Education Association, who said: "I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers." Even Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence even advocated that “our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property.”

This our hypocrisy, on the one hand broadly proclaiming the importance of individuality yet at the same time ignoring that we promote a one-size-fits-all schooling that is forced on us. Thus we proclaim our schools are free when they are not, over-looking that a "free education" is nothing more than a state-owned and socialized education. I suggest this because if the state pays and provides the area of what should be instructed, then they can only accomplish what John Stuart Mill characterized as shaping “people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the dominant power in the government.” This is not hard to see, as a parent or a teacher, it is obvious that as Curriculums become more standardized, government from the county to the feds end up having more and more control in the schooling process – notice how I didn’t say education. And since the public school system is funded by tax dollars, the more teachers and administrators are protected and seen as the main stakeholders as compared to the students and parents. It is supply and demand in reverse.

In last year’s state of the Union address, President Obama advocated that every state should require that “all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn 18,” which in simple terms is a federal. This is a bad idea and an omen. On the real, government public schooling isn’t education at all and serves to advance political dogma in the form of reducing opposition to wealth transfers via the old communist instructional tactic that such is the American democratic way (namely because systems of state-controlled and managed schools will only be free to teach whatever the state desires).

The Public government school System is in creation to continue “social re-engineering of the minds of our children. Folk forget or rather don’t know that the government public education machine prevalent today is rooted in what Massachusetts did around 1850, and that the people resisted, even with guns until the 1880's when the state militia forcibly took children to school. I can even give a real life example. My daughters school is teaching that General Olgethorpe was a great man. Ironically I had talked to her about it when she was in the first grade when she asked “who invented Georgia.” I told her about Oglethorpe, his treachery and the manner in which helped to colonize (take Georgia from the people who lived there) America. I received a not from her teacher indicating that my daughter, all seven years old of her stood up and informed here teacher that General Oglethorpe was not a hero in her eyes as the school was attempting to teach. The teacher shared it with the other teachers in the school and she asked me if we talked about that type of stuff a lot. I responded yeas, and she knows all the halogens on the periodic table also.

If America was truly free, then Obama would not make such a statement - a free nation doesn’t compel parents to send their children to school. If history is any indication and the objectives of the individuals I quoted are on the inside looking out, then it is no wonder that in most cases if one is an African American in an urban areas, our kids generally receive a poor quality of education. Making a segregated world exist even if the law states otherwise for the gap between the haves and have-nots, is growing. Some states are so open with it that they have set different standards of academic performance based on racial ethnicity. Other states have even stopped teaching certain subjects like algebra based on race. Maybe this is why the government and others are against home schooling, because it makes people think for themselves and produces people like me. I do not want to even think of where I would have been if my parents and realitives had not instructed me, or taught me the constitution at age 9 or how to hunt or fish. I know for certain I would not have learned such sitting in a Government Concentration Camps, I mean Classes, especially if I expected them to teach instead of school me.

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Hard out here


I think that a person can read and see metaphors in all around them. I will try to take this to the next step. There is a song that many folks either like or dislike. Its main lyrics go “It’s hard out hear for a pimp.” Taking this a step further, let us for argument sake equate the word pimp to folk, man, brother or homey and see what we get.

A recent story in the
March 26, 2006 issue of the New York Times started with this paragraph:

“Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups.”

The truth is that we do not finish high school as frequently as others, we die of cardiovascular disease and other chronic ailments than others and we traditionally make way less than others, with the exception of the local neighborhood pharmaceutical representative, hip-hop musicians, or the assorted professional athlete.

Why is this case? It is difficult to believe but these occurrences have been consistent over the years since the days of slavery. We have always had health related problems as well as have always been the target of social darwinism that would – in many instances- suggest that our intellect was less than other races. Even to the extent that laws were made to assist in maintaining intellectual and political hegemony over black men.

In 1646 for example, the colony of Virginia passed “The House of Burgess’ Statue (Law)”. This law defined men of African descent as an object of personal property. This was used by the so-called father of” of American psychiatry 1797, Dr. Benjamin Rush to suggest that “the color of blacks was cause by a rare disease called “Negritude”. This basically suggested that disease/skin color could be used as a reason for segregation
Today, this has manifested into a new for of legal segregation and tyranny that specifically targets Black men. We can see this in differences in police arrest practices and differentials in extreme poverty largely cause the race inequalities in incarceration rates. Of the 265,100 state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses in 2002, 126,000 (47.53%) were black, and 64,500 (24.33%) were white. Such a disparity equal that which we see in health and shows how devastating politically inspired incarceration policies (3 strike laws for example) are harmful to African Americans – especially us men. Then it is estimated that of the 2.1 million offenders incarcerated as of June 30, 2004, approximately 576,600 were Africa American between ages 20 and 39 compared about 1.7% of white males.


In theory, there is supposed to be justice and equal protection of the law to all. But we see that race unfortunately is still employed to criminalize that which main stream America fears and sees as a danger. Couple this with the joblessness, poverty, and high drop out rates; we will continue to see America’s true level of appreciation for men of African descent, which is none. So ladies, the next time you take that “waiting to exhale” perspective on life and say that there are no good men around, just remember the facts note that no one, other than the men, and maybe you, perceive that reality because we don’t believe it ourselves and propagate the continued political hegemony that reduces black men as objects that need to be dealt with as opposed to being accepted for who they are. For it is truly hard out here for a brother, homey and/or black man, “trying to get this money for the rent.”