Mis Education: Killing Fields

The Crisis of Education

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WORK IN PROGRESS:(( This article will always be a work in progress as it covers a very broad take on education. As always when you do something so epic you always tell yourself– We could have gone deeper. We could have brought more external research, we could have read more books and done more. But no research is so extensive to exhaust any topic and this is the groundwork from which subsequent work can be built upon. ))

Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today– Malcolm X

The most dangerous state to be in is uneducated. Uneducated people are very vulnerable people; easily duped, and easily exploited they live in fear of their own shadow. Everything unknown is a potential threat because they lack the capacity to comprehend and successfully engage the tangible and intangible world. In the end, they are their own worst enemies not even understanding their own self-interest.

Children not raised by their parents will be raised by the world, and the world has a lot of terrible things to teach them — Maulana Karenga, 500 Years Later

Go through every stat that ever existed about education and what you will find across time and the cultural divide is that education produces education. Homes with highly educated parents will almost always, without exception, produce educated children. Even greater than the quality of the school is the quality of the education in the social environment. A home rich with academic imprints on a child far greater than a prestigious school.((The Asian American Achievement Paradox, Jennifer Lee. In this paper, the author ties the appearance of success to immigration practices that favor educated Asian families over uneducated ones. This is her opinion but the point is there is a direct connection between families that are educated and educated children–beyond a shadow of any conceivable doubt. And the same is true for Ashkenazi Jews.))((The Asian American Paradox article))

If we let the world chosen expectations for your children they will start low and stay there – Accountant film

School has the latent objective of keeping down the pressure on the labour market by keeping (detaining) the potential workforce from the labour market. It is indeed on purpose especially in societies where governments are short of ideas on job creation.— Pope Aviva Rahmani

The common school system is akin to a meat processing food plant.  They define education by you correctly guessing what they want you to write and then writing it. It is a system comparable to mass-manufactured clothing vs tailor-made clothes.  And it is hard for many to accept because we are also victims of this system, trained to trust it with our kid’s education, we trust it when they say to accept some more credit cards and get into deeper debt. Why would you trust these people with your kids? They have “parent-teacher” talks that are 10 minutes long to discuss your child’s performance. That is Mcdonald’s not education.

But what does the state want?  For one they don’t teach critical thinking in school. They don’t teach them to be leaders in industry, only workers in industry disconnected from the process(( Herman, Edward S.; Chomsky, Noam. Manufacturing Consent. New York: Pantheon Books)). They most certainly don’t teach them to think for themselves. The job of the system is to produce functionites. They not going to create the next Che or Malcolm X. Only People who consume and support McDonald’s and Mickey Mouse. People who spend their free time imbibing social media and soaps and 9-5 as labor units getting into debt to get that new LG or Honda.

If you do not have them on manners by 8, maybe you are too late — Ako((Ako, producer 500 Years Later made this statement after we visited a Saturday School in London))

The system knows most will not make it. ((In fairness it would be impossible for any developing nation to do differently. If rich countries cannot, what about the poor. So in fairness to the system, most will not make it because there is no capacity to have those success rates. This article is therefore a message to parents who want to beat the odds))It has accepted this but parade illusion in front of your eyes to give you hope that you can beat the odds. And by making it I mean the expectations

“Education is a system of imposed ignorance.”
― Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent

most intelligent parents have for their children will not be met by the system. But they will leave you with the illusion, just like the illusion of your chances of winning the lottery. Let me be the bearer of terrible news, there is a better chance that your child will fail than succeed if you are poor and African.  And let me spell it out using a different language, your child is born with a unique potential, most children who should be curing cancer and exploring water deposits on Mars, or creating epic art, will never ever reach that potential because of the system of global education. That is not its job. Are we still confused? The baby girl who could cure cancer is drinking dirty water from a sewer in Kibera, Kenya. Her potential is arrested because she was born African, Kenyan, and poor. And Elon Musk would be in the sewers of Soweto had he been born to a different race, class, and economic status.

Up to 80% of what we holistically call education comes from your milieu or upbringing. So a home environment full of books will produce readers of books. A home full of pianos will produce pianist, and a home full of scholars will more likely produce more scholars.

So now you know make sure you take an active role in your children’s education: Your children your responsibility. And just like everything from cars to phones come in different qualities, so too does education. The best education will naturally cost more, but it is an investment. It either will cost more money or more of your time. But what is more valuable than your children. So, after or before dinner sit down 4 days a week with your child and supplement their education. The etiology of the educational crisis is a complex relationship between quality of schooling, especially what goes on in the home, class, money, socialization, social exposure, on and on. What we are fundamentally discussing here is culture. ((Thomas Sowell from 1984 on how and why culture matters)) Expecting genius out from a poor environment with no money and no quality schooling is like throwing a kid off a cliff and following up with some cute rhetoric like “I hope they survive.” I am sure one or two will.

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WHAT IS EDUCATION?

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Your enslaved ancestors were not all field hands, not all house servants. The division of slave labor was much more diverse than that and it included: shipbuilders, carpenters, millwrights, etc. However, they work for one fundamental thing and that is the enrichment and profits of their masters. Consequently, even though you may have jobs and professions different from your ancestors, your work is fundamentally the same whether you make the vice president of Xerox– Amos Wilson

Before we get any deeper into our discussion of education, let us deal with what we mean by education. If education, or being educated is knowing the square root of 42, then a 4 dollar calculator is educated. Education is not just having skills. Because when you visit the factory in New York of Steinway and Sons pianos you see a whole heap of Africans working away for 3o years, all highly skilled yet how many of them own stakes in Steinway and Sons? How many of them even own a piano? All over the world, we are confused by this, because we think all we need to do is go to University and then go and make someone else richer. True education is way more holistic than that. It deals also with how you apply your skills in the world so that they serve you first, not someone else. So we are good at being a doctor in someone else’s hospital. Do we have the deeper education to own and run our own hospital? Many Africans are scholars at white universities and are proud to be published by Random House, yet how many of those smart people will ever build a university or start a publishing house to rival Random House? We are the best actors in someone else’s films. But how many of us own production studios? And even if we add Tyler Perry to that list just take a look at what he makes with his “own” studio. So black labor still equals white wealth. That means we are not truly educated or skilled.

We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and “success”, defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.— Chris Hedges

Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance—William Durant

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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PEDAGOGY

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One of the painful signs of years of dumbed-down education is how many people are unable to make a coherent argument. They can vent their emotions, question other people’s motives, make bold assertions, repeat slogans—anything except reason.— Thomas Sowell

Education is tricky you can teach people about Black consciousness at school yet it does not make them conscious. I was shocked to find that some schools in South Africa were teaching Malcolm X, even showing the film, yet when you look at the pupils there was not one drop of consciousness. So we need to really rethink this thing. Because the fight all along was to change the content of education to produce a better person–not that easy.  It was like they watched Star Wars and treated it as fiction. Which makes you think a lot about pedagogy. Because there is more to this thing than teaching a subject academically but then failing to connect it to conscious liberation. They learn it to pass an exam; nothing more. You could not invite them to dinner and have a 2-minute conversation about any topic. They would not, between themselves discuss it as a hot conversation piece.

And all of this has to do with the complex topic of how people acquire information. Because they still walk out into the world as zombie slaves. Yet there are people who learned about Malcolm and Garvey from uncles and older brothers who are staunch Pan-Africanist today.

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GOOD SCHOOL OR GOOD PARENTS?

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“As of 1960, 2/3 of all African American children were living with both parents. That declined over the years until only 1/2 were living with both parents in 1995… Among African American families in poverty, 85% of the children had no father present”— Thomas Sowell

Which one is it? Good schools created by good students or good parents created by good schools? Well, there is a dyad and they feed each other but with that being said parents create good students and rich parents collectively send their children to rich schools which have resources, but that is secondary to the power of lots of rich kids in one class who have private tuition and trips overseas and horse riding and piano lessons on the weekend.  Socialization is key in what makes these schools with all these rich kids perform so well. Now here is the ultimate thought experiment to conclude this debate that is pretty obvious. Take a class of exceptional students from a so-called good school and transfer them to a poor school and see how it affects their grades. Now take all the kids from the poor school and put them in the “good” school and see what happens. I promise you nothing will change much. Because good students from good homes are what really create good schools. So kids from poor homes assume that also implies poor uneducated parents will not improve significantly if taken as a class and placed in a good school. If you took 2 of them and mixed them in with the good students from the “good” school, then maybe.  The home is where real education happens, the school only complements what is going on at home. The values come from the home. Yes, we will always get that one or two kids who come from a swamp to become Dr. but 100

% strong education at home, a strong performance at school. This is why (mentioned somewhere else in this epic article) a home with two Dr. produces more Drs. The home of jazz pianists creates jazz pianists. A home of erudite produces erudiction.

In my own observations, I saw a 5-year-old boy who could read at a very high standard. So the mistake that one would make is to see that he goes to an expensive school and come to the conclusion that “he can read because he goes to a good school.” Incorrect. Because at that same school there is a Zimbabwe student from a poor background who is 9 years old and cannot read.  Same school, one is almost twice the age of the other one. Clearly, the boy can read because he is coming from a home that is better off and can teach him to read. Yet the school takes the credit when it is the parent.

Above is a 5-year-old performing at a school. All the onlookers are thinking what an advanced school teaching this young boy to play Canon in D. But he did not learn to play one note from the prestigious school.

At the end of the year, the school will celebrate all its victories but most of those victories are not the schools doing. The kid that won the best art project is in the same class as the kid that does not know the Earth goes around the Sun. The talented kids are talented because of factors mainly outside of the school. They will use that person as proof of how great they are and how much more is coming in the years to come. But the truth is no such improvements are transparent and what they say is just marketing. Trusting that parents cannot organize as a body and complain as a collective, or make each other aware. So divide and conquer works for schools also.

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WHITE/GOOD SCHOOLS

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Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children — Malcolm X

If you have the money, send your children to the school that gets the best results. There is no other criteria that matter once you can afford—and afford you must. Malcolm said only a fool would let his enemy teach their children and this is 100% correct but we must dig deeper and ask deeper questions than take it at surface value. I do not think Malcolm was talking about math and biology, but the education on one’s cultural and political identity. And the enemy here certainly is not limited to White. Because the conclusion of this article is that the enemy is the system. The system creates drones that serve the white economic enclaves globally.

Schools are certainly not equal regardless of what the brochure says. What this means in Africa is that maybe a so-called “White” school or international schools get the academic results so it is better to put your child in the school that gets the results and makes no apologies about it. If the “Black schools” are sucky, avoid them. ((Why are Black schools suckie? Well, if the children that make up the school are coming from poorly educated families then a class filled with such students will create a lower educational environment compared to a school with children from highly educated parents. If there is a link between race and education it will express itself by showing a relationship between “black majority” schools and White majority schools.)) And what you find in Africa is that Black majority schools are devalued and a shallow interpretation of this would link it to race. But it is not really a “racial” problem, in so much that African people are genetically less capable, but a social-economic development problem where African people are at the bottom of education. We can travel to the USA and see African American majority schools with exceptional results. We see wealthy Muslim ((no specific racial make-up)) schools in South Africa getting those same results.

Case Study: While doing this research in South Africa for this article we spoke to an African teacher for pre-school at a middle-class African majority school and then spoke to her Indian contemporary at a Muslim school. The level of education between the two was epic. While you could have the fullest intellectual conversation on education with the Indian teacher, the African teacher barely could process full English and sustain a scholarly discussion, yet with the Indian teacher, the discussion was rich with erudition. And this was repeated at a so-called White school in South Africa the pattern was the same. The African teachers were the poorest in terms of education and not by a little.

A lot of confusion comes because Africans have an identity problem. Being “Black” creates this negative identity where living in the ghetto makes you more black, broken English makes you more authentic. But a true African identity does not work like that. More African means speaking Swahili and Amharic and being more conscious of your glorious past and chasing the excellence of our ancestors, like the ones who built Timbuktu, Axum and Giza.

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THE LOOP

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Only a fool would let his enemy teach his children — Malcolm X

But if we are also products of the system how can we change this outcome? That is what consciousness African Consciousness is all about, breaking the cycle. Most are in the Matrix chewing on a fake steak, so this message is clearly not for most. We must remember that part of how any system protects itself is by treating any other ideas as threats outside of conventional thinking. Such ideas naturally stimulate our “antibodies”. That is how the primitive human mind works.

Unconventional information is treated like a virus invading our “safe’ world. Only monsters and the thoughts of monsters exist outside of the structured system. The victim never ever reflects on the system, because the system is perceived as sacrosanct. And this is how institutionalized racism operates, by establishing immovable beliefs about the nature of information.

In its quest for certainty, Western philosophy continues to generate what it imagines to be colorless and genderless accounts of knowledge, reality, morality, and human nature– Alison Baile

If you doubt this post just think about what a country needs from you and walk backward at how the system makes sure they get what they want from their citizens. Vote for us and fight in our wars. Now how do you get people ignorant enough to always go along and never challenge? Media, popular culture, and education.

What is the average African American interested in? Without going to Gallop polls let us take a wild stab at it. Between a discussion on parenting and education vs police brutality which one is more likely to get people talking? Just try to bring up education on social media, and then start discussing Bruno Mars, or Kanye’s pending divorce and see the difference.  Unless a White person shoots a Black person you will struggle to get a heated debate going. While some will argue this is not limited to African Americans but who is most in need of the conversation on parenting and education? Koreans or African Americans. If in your house you do not read books you cannot expect your child to be a literary genius. But who are the icons of the black world? Intellectuals? A scan of Netflix for African American content returns an all too familiar pattern: sports, rappers, victims of racism, and criminals. So Whites have a film on Stephen Hawkins we have one on Biggie.(( Suggested further research: Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency  Walter B. Miller First published: Summer 1958)) There are few multidimensional representations of Africans and that must affect the African child when thinking about “What can I be in this world?”

 

And it is a dyadic relationship, not a unilateral imposition. We imbibe this stuff and they produce more. And this is why we went from serious content two decades ago, to more and more nonsense. They have films like 300 for Europeans we have Black Panther— 300 is a real historical event in Greek-Persian history, Black Panther (as good as it was for our image of self) is still fiction.

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ROBOT FACTORY

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The automatons and gatekeepers that is what the system produces. Robots regurgitate what they been taught by other robots. When it comes to concepts such as exposure they have none. So do they know what exposure means in an educational setup if they themselves have never been 200KM outside their own town?  So these are the foot soldiers of the empire of control.

The worst school on Earth is still going to defend what they are doing. The worst mechanic of Earth is not going to put up a sign saying “I am the worst mechanic on Earth.” Bad teachers like good teachers think highly of themselves. Good politicians and useless politicians all believe they are serving the people. What else do you expect them to say? So we do not care about their delusion state, we need criteria to judge them. Because if someone is a good filmmaker, they will easily show us all the good films they have made. A good tree produces sweet fruit, a bad tree bad fruit.

So they have a system of “age-based-learning” a child is 4 so someone in a Ph.D. position said here are the global limits for children aged 4 and imposed it on the world. So they point to a white door and ask the child– What color is it? The child says white so they tick a box and say he has met the criteria of colors for his age. They then point to a guitar and ask ” What shape is this guitar” the child says the wrong thing and they mark it as a fail. They should have asked the child to play the guitar. But that is not on their list. Because what would happen if the child picked up the guitar and started ripping Jimi Hendrix? Would that be age-appropriate?

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EUROCENTRIC

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If I walked all around African and said Rome, how many people would know it is in Italy? If I said Queen immediately people have an image of a White woman in the UK in Buckingham Palace. Now how about if I said Timbuktu or Axum? How many people in African universities would know where that is? I do not know the answer but we need to have these types of questions to figure out what is going on within our educational system. This is why Einstein said he spends most of his time on questions.

When we were making Motherland and we started talking about Slavery in most of Africa (with the exception of Ghana) most people did not really know how African Americans, African- Brazilians, African- Caribbean people ended up so far away from home. That sounds like an educational crisis. A similar test tested the general knowledge in South Africa about countries that bordered RSA. Very few knew. Most struggled, when given a map, to locate their own country in the world. Yet this is not true for Ethiopia. And there is a very good reason for that. And what we do is test these things and then ask the question to understand the deep-seated issues facing most African countries, especially those with a deep history of Eurocentric control in education. But this is too much for the average non-critical thinker they so stuck on national pride to ever know why we crunch data and seek solutions. While you are being offended your educational system drifts further into the mud. And this is one of the major reasons Africa is in a crisis. For decades people have been critical of the colonial educational system, yet it still lingers. Even in Ethiopia, we find things we would not expect to find in their institutions of higher learning.

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THE BAR

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A country sets a standard up based on what they expect for a country. So let us simplify this and compare to countries fictionally in South Africa they say children who are 4 years must count to 10, in Japan the government sets it at 40. Why do countries have different standards? In South Africa, the average in a county with an educational crisis is way below that of Japan. South Africa loves giving children downtime, Japan does not. ((School facts about Japan)) Even the teachers in Japan work much harder and are under the gun to deliver. ((Survey of teacher working hours in Japan))And we see now why we can expect more Sonys out of Japan and less from South Africa. A totally different attitude to knowledge.

So if South Africa was to put Japanese standards in place they would end up with a lot of failures on their hand. Remember this is an oversimplified fictional story to drive home a very salient point. If South Africa in this set up was faced with such failures after adopting Japanese standards they have only two options, put a lot of money into education or drop the standards to those which match the average 4 year old. Now, remember the disparity of education, like wealth in South Africa, would be one of the greatest in the world. If we looked at the average we would get a false number since at least 80% might be able to count to 10 by the age of 4, yet the other 20% be able to count to 50. So there is an epic gap. Now in Japan, there is no disparity. So the average 4 year old might be able to count from 1 – 35 with an even spread. We cannot use averages in South Africa to understand reality due to the disparity and must depend on looking at the median, not the average. Then we realize the scope of the problem for anyone trying to set up milestones in a country with a serious education crisis. You cannot be fair to all. Either the smart will be waiting on the sides for the slowest to get to 10, or the smart will be favored and the slow left behind. So benchmarks and milestones set by a country have absolutely nothing to do with what is best for your child (the individual).

FALSE STATS

A few years ago when a whole heap of children performed poorly with their matrix exam in South Africa what did the government do? Again they could either bring up the education to get the kids on target or they could simply say “we are pushing them too hard” and drop the standard. Now the next statement is going to drive home the nail. We do not live on islands, we live in a globalized world. If education is not the same can the outcome be the same? How can a child from South Africa at 20 go to university in Japan? And come out to be a top engineer for Yamaha? The only way it might happen is for the very gifted. Or those in South Africa are privately educated to standards above those set by political forces. So when it comes to the advancement of nations we start to understand why India and China and everyone else are tech giants and us in Africa consumers. Within South Africa, you have senior people running the postal service who do not know Ethiopia is in Africa. Because when you add BEE to the mix they have to hire people who are Black (the 80% who perform the worst) for positions they lack the education for. Where does that leave the country?

And we need to speak clearly about these issues and not worry about political correctness. Because political correctness is the bane of authentic research. Had this article had to worry about “not offending” the sensitivities of failed cultures, half the time would be wasted in that pursuit.

A poor black boy from Hardin farm in South Africa at 16 VS a 9-year-old white girl from Hillcrest (a rich suburb). Put them in a room and give them the latest copy of National geographic. What do you think would happen? Now let us work backward and drop the nonsense and start to discuss the problem in real-world terms. It is what it is. And it tells you everything you need to know about education and why the rich stay rich regardless of how “equal “politicians and sensitive people want it to be so.

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CULTURE & CLASS

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Overall, for children of immigrants, educational trajectories and achievements vary according to parental socioeconomic backgrounds, home environments, and the neighbourhood and school contexts. However, the factor that most strongly predicts educational pathways for children of immigrants and explains their disadvantaged positions compared to the majority student population tends to be socioeconomic background, i.e. the social class position of their parents (((Glick & White, 2003; Heath & Brinbaum, 2007; Kao & Thompson, 2003).))

Culture is a very big word. Sometimes it is so big that using it without clarification has no meaning. Let us discuss the role of culture in the education of a child. There are comparative studies done comparing say European educational methods to African educational methods.((Family involvement and educational success of the children of immigrants in Europe. Comparative perspectives
Philipp Schnell, Rosita Fibbi, Maurice Crul & Martha Montero-Sieburth )) And show is that there is a fundamental difference in how children in Africa (as a generalization) are educated. There is more a “watch me and do as I do” children are not encouraged to question, then how do they become critical thinkers?

((There is an extensive research paper on this which I cannot locate right now but it deals with German parenting vs I think Tanzania)) The outcome of this is unfortunately a less inquisitive mind. From my own anecdotal experiences in South Africa comparing European children, Indians and Africans there is a profound difference which is modified by class where native African children are way more reserved and curious, far less willing to ask a question. ((I have done a lot of motivational lectures all around the world and noticed that in some demographics the interaction was extremely poor))((I flew a drone in front of a 14-year-old boy from the farms of South Africa and got no reaction out of him–not even a question. I did the same thing around an immigrant boy from Burundi and got so many questions my head started to hurt. With Indian kids, the same result as with the Burundi boy, around Ethiopians the same. Around Zulu children in the suburbs a more engaging response. This is not scholarly data, but just to let you know the differences are there and it does mean something. Because the boy from the farm when bored and left alone in a room full of books, he laid in the bed and looked at the ceiling, he did not touch one single book, while the Burundi boy at age 8 picked them up and looked at the pictures. The Indian Muslim kid discussed the title of one of the books. Someone more qualified needs to test these things if they have not done so already. Serious different attitudes.  ))

Within each ethnic group monitored, the percentage of family types which are single parents are as follows: black (24%), mixed((Which from the POV of this article means of African heritage and African culture so just add 24 +19 =43%)) (19%), ‘other’ and white (both 10%) and Asian (8%). –Single Parent Statistics: UK Facts and Figures 2019 ((Single Parent stats UK))

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Research conducted in the past five years by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and the South African Race Relations Institute (SARRI) found that 60 percent of SA children have absent fathers, and more than 40 percent of South African mothers are single parents, compared with 25 percent in the US. With developing nations scoring 15% If you are black and poor , In South Africa, there is a strong correlation between race and class. ((These stats are staggering and they stand alone))

Single parent households that don’t work and too often do abuse((neglect is a form of abuse, parking a child in front of a TV and feeding them junk is abuse)) their children — this is along with thug culture, and anti-intellectualism promoted as realities for African American children. So this is now part of Black culture, not only in America but in places like France, UK, South Africa, and Israel also. And let us not forget the standards we see in the Caribbean. And the home is to blame. If in South Africa 70% of the children have no permanent fathers what do you think the outcome of that is? A society that has social workers and a system so steeped in backward cultural dogma to realize the role of culture in destroying the future of children. ((Separate article on this coming)) These are cultural problems. And they are endless. In Zulu culture, it is common to deny a child a father if he fails to comply with practices like “damages” and “lobola.”  No cultural restrictions when it comes to teenage pregnancies but culture steps in to block the young couple from getting married and saving their money for their critical start in life.  So what we see is a culture that stymies a child’s development for the sake of “tradition.” So the men just impregnate women and runoff, it is not worth it. Mothers then dumped the children on the single-parent grandmother and get back into the dating game. What would this do to a child? ( Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 1969)((Working with Mary Ainsworth, a Canadian psychologist, Bowlby provided support for the idea that mothers and children are mutually motivated to seek proximity to one another for survival. He argued that a mother’s sensitivity to her child’s desire for closeness and comfort was a critical factor in shaping attachment and child development. This sensitivity relates to a mother’s ability and capacity to detect, understand and respond appropriately to her child’s cues around distress and threat. If her baby is distressed, a securely attached mother is attuned to the distress – she detects it, she is motivated to alleviate it, and she offers a set of soothing responses to do so. Leading attachment researchers have argued that a consistent lack of such maternal sensitivity in infancy and early childhood results in a belief that the world is unsupportive and that one is unlovable.))

The system supports this by rewarding them with grant money. The same exact system used in Great Britain for African-Caribbean British women. Today we see an entire generation of fatherless thugs roaming the street contributing nothing to society. But for the British government, it was a form of control, they essentially created a useless generation and protected the job market and wealth for non-Africans. They had to have known that the outcome of social welfare would be generations of failed kids to serve as unskilled and semi-skilled labor in the UK. And the same is true for Israel.

The attitude of a group towards the education of their youngest members is a cultural issue.

Overall, 61.4% of young people reported having graduated from high school. Among female youth 19.2% had had an adolescent pregnancy, and among male youth 5.8% had impregnated a girl when they were an adolescent (12–19 years), 16.2% of the women ever had an unwanted pregnancy and 6.7% had ever terminated a pregnancy((Adolescent pregnancy and associated factors in South African youth: G Mchunu,1 K Peltzer,1,2 B Tutshana,1 and L Seutlwadi1))

You will often hear people reply to the disparity by dragging slavery and colonialism into this. This has been heavily addressed on our article on Slavery: Maafa. But to summarize. No one cares. And allow an explanation. Regardless of where we start in this world, we are all in the same race. Either your children are founders of the next generation of microchips or they work sweeping the floor for the next those people who develop the next generation of microchips. In this discussion, the ‘how we got in this boat” does not alter anything we need to do to get out of this sinking ship. We all are in the race, regardless of our handicaps. Slavery or no slavery that is how the world is. No one is going to give you a job flying a plane when you have no skills just because your ancestors were exploited for 300 years. Either you can fly the plane or you cannot. The job of getting this education (with or without knowing about slavery) is the same. So let us begin to work on a fix. Alternatively, I propose waiting for 3000 years to pass while we remain victims.

What does love have to do with it? — Tina Turner

I think everyone on Earth wants good things for their children. If you grab a random mom off the street and ask her ” what do you want your child to be, a Dr or a domestic?” they would say “a Dr.” Yet we came across a young South African girl who was soon turning 7 and could not read and write. I went straight to the mother and almost out of breath told her the sad news that the school was neglecting her child. Her reaction was indifferences. From her point of view, she was poor and there was nothing she could do about it. So I contacted the school and challenged them, as far as they were concerned they were on track and spat out the rhetoric about meeting certain acceptable standards. So despite what parents say they want, what they do or are willing to do is a different matter. On the flip side, there was a poor lady trying to buy a book for her daughter on credit. Can you imagine trying to buy a kids’ book that cost $10 bucks on credit over 4 months? Most do this for shoes and brand-name tops. But you know what that told me? That is a real mother. So I bought the book for her. And let us discuss why the word “Love” does not belong in this discussion. Gym Guthrie said “love is too mysterious” and she is right. Because it is an abstract term, because if we are discussing “loving your children” then why would anyone neglect their child’s education while professing love? “I love my child” but abandon them to raise themselves. “I love my child” but destroy the right for a good parent to see their child. Would you burn all your kid’s favorite toys for them to see and then call it love? no. Would you watch your child suffer in poverty so you can play with them when they have a father who can care for them?  So it is best we leave “love” out of these things and deal with the fundamental not the mysterious.

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MILIEU

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Culture creates the milieu ((The social environment, social context, sociocultural context or milieu refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. It includes the culture that the individual was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact)) but some think that good education = money. But then what would happen if you gave 1 million dollars to someone from the lower classes? Would it automatically mean their children would in 10 years be ready for Yale and Oxford? Of course not. Money does pay for a lot, piano classes, good schools, supplementary classes, but none of that means anything if the environment is anti-intellectual and fractured. ((Read our article on African Marriages.)) With that million dollars, the Nike shoes afforded over books will just be replaced with Hilfiger shoes over books. The 28″ old TV where the kids are parked day and night would be upgraded to a 55″ one.

Money does not build confidence in a child, nor does it give them that mental attitude to pursue excellence.  If the environment is full of uneducated single moms, aunts, and grannies lying down in bed to 11 AM while spending all day watching soaps and checking status updates on Whatsapp then honestly do you think you will get the same outcome as a Jewish home where the entire family sits down and debates and reads Hemingway and Chomsky?  So money or no money, the outcome of a rich uneducated family vs a middle class educated family would yield predictable results proving that money (while critical) is not greater than the social environment. ((Lower Class Culture as a Generating Milieu of Gang Delinquency, Walter B. Miller, Summer 1958))((In my own anecdotal observations in South Africa you find the children of nurses, teachers, and other middle-income civil servants on the corner doing dope, just like their lower-class counterparts in the poverty areas. Because the parents share the same mindset. Children who were fortunate to have their private education funded by Whites and others also show a tendency to regress back into this anti-intellectual culture. Despite being afforded the same good schools as Whites. All due to their cultural environment, they fail to connect themselves (regardless of money) with excellence preferring to be what they see Blacks do on MTV ))

So what you find in the average American Jewish home is they are not forcing kids to read books, they are complaining about them reading books at the dinner table. How did this happen? Well, what they did was when the kid was 3 they did not actually teach them to read, they taught them to want to read. ((And I experienced this with my own son. It got to a point where I did not teach him at 4 years to learn to write, he wanted to learn to write and I guided him. He wanted to search for dinosaurs on the computer so he wanted to learn how to type on a keyboard. )) Your work is done when you have them invested in education because they desire an education.

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DO NOT PUSH THEM

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When you look at different people across a broad enough demographic to remove random genius, or luck why are some people aeronautical engineers while others cashiers at KFC? If we listed all the factors one of them would be upbringing aka the social environment they were raised in. It is not the only factor but we can agree on an important one. High achievers more often come from high-achieving families. So one guy’s father has a massive BMW workshop and he turns 21 and opens a BMW valet service. You can clearly see how the father influenced the son.  We see it all the time, a household of medical professionals has children who are also medical professionals. And all of that is created in the home environment. The drive that the parents inherited or acquired is passed on to the children. So a house with a high appreciation of academia will push anyone in that home in the same direction.

You always hear this odd philosophy of not pushing children. Where pushing seems to be a lay world for developing their potential and seeding excellence in their character. But who said this is the best approach? A few years ago we were studying how Ocacia trained its staff and they told us that they could get someone from zero to professional in one year. So then we looked at fashion schools that took 3 years. So why the difference? Then we remember during the making of Motherland film students were used especially from  South Africa, yet their performance was horrendous. Why is this? How can someone with 3 years at film school be at a lower level than Halaqah students with only 1-year of experience? The answer is pedagogy((Read more)) Hands-down learning in a practical setting will trump cold blackboard-style learning. Using hands-on will have greater results than only reading a book. And the simple reason why schools have this slow approach is that that is what is best for them, the schools, they have nothing to do with the student’s potential. It does not take 3 years to learn to become a tailor (per Ocacia). But if you want to take 3 years you now have 3 years of someone’s tuition. Ocacia is a factory, and taking 3 years to train a tailor is financially and practically no good.  On top of that, the tailor coming out after 1 year has a greater understanding of tailoring because they were instructed in a live practical environment working on real clothes for real customers. So what someone wants determines their path. Schooling wants to drag out the process for their own profit. With Ocacia and other factories, they cannot afford to drag out the process and need top results in a shorter space of time. And we can all recall how China built a COVID-19 hospital in next to no time–because there was no time to muck about.

I have no idea who gets to their full potential at any level without serious pushing? Parents of successful children first train their children to push themselves. To accept nothing but the best. So this, on the surface, seems like a different approach pushing someone vs letting them grow at their own pace. But you can do both if (the biggest word in this sentence) you tailor the teaching experience to the specific student of any age. Not everyone is going to be a film director, then understand “pushing in this context”. You do not push a child lacking science skills to do science, but when you find they are into the say liberal arts you push them to their full potential. A gifted musician is rarely an equally gifted mathematician. So identifying the skillset of someone is the first step, then they are groomed into that direction. And how that grooming is done is critical also. We not talking about Joe Jackson or Mr. Williams. But know that there is no one in the history of greatness that was not pushed to achieve. And on that note who is buying phones from who? Is Africa supplying Korea with phones? Yet we find in Korea as in Japan the child-raising attitudes that make sure Samsung and Sony will forever be Asian.

There are ideologies and then they are methodologies. A perfect ideology followed by a flawed methodology can fail. But failed ideologies always, regardless of their methodologies, fail. The ideology of creating genius children is sound, the methodology is another debate. The ideology of “leave them, let them be free to find their way” is flawed, no methodology following this ideology works.

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WE ARE NOT THE SAME

The person born with three legs and the person born with no legs must all run in the same race as the person with two legs.

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We have all read the studies of Ashkenazi intelligence. ((Are Jews Smarter Than Everyone Else?))

Without getting into it too much what are the reasons for these apparent results? Well, I certainly do not believe in the intellectual genetic superiority of any group, Jewish or otherwise. But there are differences in the environment that do way more in explaining the results. And it is not just Jews. What do the results say about Indian Muslims in Barbados and South Africa? Why do overseas Ethiopian students perform so well? ((Just based upon my anecdotal experiences in London many of the engineers and science-based students from Africa were from specific countries, South Africa was not one of them, Ethiopic people dominated these courses as well as overseas Indians)) As stated before the details are outside of the scope of this article but we have to admit that environment is key. The Korean home in America is not the African American home. Why are so-called ‘genius” kids the majority Asians?  ((Genius kids look at racial breakdown who is less represented?))The Japanese educational system is not the Malawi one. China is not Congo. Even the Caribbean immigrant home in America is not the same as the African Americans. (Sowell) But the second-generation African Caribbean people (post-Windrush) are a mess. ((The 80’s era of council houses and single parent aka the welfare state))

So clearly a home with an emphasis on education will create more educated children. Obviously, a home that has rules such as no TV at the dinner table and families sitting down and reading books will create a different child than those homes that park children in front of the TV while eating or let them play violent video games in their bedroom until they go blind.  We do not need a protracted discussion about these things, they are pretty clear-cut. In a Muslim home in South Africa, everyone is in business and the children are taken to the madrasa and taught to memorize the Qur’an what impact does that have on memory in later life? A positive improvement of the child’s cognitive intelligence((The effect of memorizing Quran on the children
cognitive intelligence PDF download))((Methodology: The data was collected through test, observation, documentation, and interviews. The kindergarten students should memorize the Al Insyirah surah of the Qur’an using the Tasalsuli method. The observation of cognitive intelligence results was measured before (pre-treatment) and after the treatment (post-treatment). The results revealed that the procedure of memorizing the Qur’an improved children’s cognitive intelligence. Results: The research concluded that memorizing Quran in kindergarten might positively improve the children’s cognitive intelligence. Implications/Applications: The cognitive intelligence score of children was 25.40 after the treatment. The score had an improvement of 5.00 then the pre-treatment test with a score of 20.40. The pre-treatment test resulted in 63.75% of improvement, while the post-treatment test resulted in 79.38%. The difference was 15.63%.))

If you were to attend a PTA meeting in a native local African South Africa, and then go to an Indian area and attend a PTA meeting in South Africa and then go to a rich White area what do you think you would see? We always must ask questions and let answers fall into place where possible. Should they be different? I mean everyone is South African in this setup. Let us take outclass and say the Africans, Indians, and White had the same income do you think you would still see differences in their engagement at a PTA meeting? What about if we said Asian-Americans in New York, Jewish-Americans in the same city, and African Americans? You would see a disparity due to cultural differences and you would see a difference due to class also. We have observed how less engaging local “black” South Africans are in a PA vs Indian South Africans. And when question times came up the nature of the questions within Indian communities were more around money issues and getting the best academic education for their children. ((Areas looked at were Pinetown, Umhlanga, and Hillcrest. Indians were more vocal and engaging around issues of getting the best education for their buck, even the more affluent ones. The less responsive group was the Africans.))

We think we are protecting children when we sing them stories of equality and fairness, but even when their parents are picking them up at school they see the inequality: someone’s mom came by foot another person’s mom came in a Land Rover sports. One got a bicycle for their birthday the other one had no birthday.

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You are playing Russian Roulette when you surrender your kids to the system. If you are very rich it is a different story. We have all the evidence from Greece of how the elite of that society was tailor-educated. ((Education, Research, and Government in the Ancient Greek World – Professor Eleanor Dickey))

What is the goal of the system is units per hour–not quality. Learn the square root of 42 and then in 2 months it will appear on an exam and you must (if you are smart) spit it back out and you pass and you can now hunt for a job. What was the purpose of learning? To get good grades to get a job, to get money! How about cultivating a love of learning for the sake of self-empowerment? Reading for the purpose of becoming better? no, learning is for the sole purpose of having access to wealth. Now access to wealth is not the problem but what happens when your only motivation is money? The system knows there are enough critical thinkers and more of them will only disrupt their system. Why encourage that? But then you look around at the teacher and social workers, and people doing jobs without any passion. Even Drs who only do the job to get a paycheck. How does that advance our society?

Go and see what they teach in those top-notch private schools. You won’t believe the difference. The ones the Princess of Monaco’s children go to. Totally different instruction. They teach how to rule the ones who go to ordinary schools. At top schools, people always focus on just those schools. Just follow those kids home and see the army of personal tutors working with them. See the parents who have endless resources to create Picasso or Einstein. It is not only the schools doing the work. And it creates an illusion that good schools create exceptional students when it is more complex than that. Good schools do usually have better teachers but they also have better parents.

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ARRESTED POTENTIAL

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A genius child in a preschool must be held back for the purpose of making them “the same” as the slowest child in the class.

What is the school waiting for? A child at 3 can already count to 20, so why is a preschool only teaching children to count to 20 at 4 years old? Makes sense? Well, it does if you understand the system is there to create the “same”. Why use age and merit to give children a more tailored learning experience? ((So two children born one month apart might fall into two different grades))And let me explain why they want this. Can you imagine running a class where one 4-year-old can read and write and the other can barely speak English? How are you going to manage that class with 20 kids with diverse needs? ((Black Americans homeschool for different reasons than whites))It’s impossible. So we have this school system that keeps them equally dumbed down so they can fit into a grading system. Has nothing to do with the children’s potential but everything to do with easier management for the processing plants. Like sheep on a feeding farm where they want them all fat at the same time for harvest. We do not know this because we are not thinking critically. Way too much trust is given to these institutions. We cannot for the life of us think that a government would stymie development. No no no, the government wants educated populations–well that is what they say on TV. But their version of education is not meeting the same standard as those genius schools. They want equality of outcome where 20 children are the same and maybe one can run the factory. But this is not what prestigious schools want, they want 20 children out of 20 ruling the world.

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SPECIAL ONES

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Your kid is not going to be one of the special ones that make it. just accept it. They will be driving a van for FedEx or something like that. Or a manager of a KFC or Walmart. But some from the system will make it– that is inevitable. And it is those few that make it that will appear to vindicate the system. And we need to be honest, what society needs 100% graduates going off the be Dr and lawyers? None. Someone has to pick up the trash, someone has to mop up the hospitals, therefore, we need a certain percentage of failure for our societies to run. If even 50% of university graduates went and opened their own businesses who would work for them? It is impossible so the system knows this. So the system does not need 100% exceptional kids. Do you honestly think if the system produced Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali then who would fight in the wars? More Noam Chomskys, Water Rodneys, Snowdens, Ches, and Chris Hedges mean too much dissent. The system must function not be interrupted.

So do not let the “success stories” mask reality. Most will fail to meet their full potential. Yet when you look at the elite schools you see a totally different outcome. I doubt anyone graduating from Harvard is working as the manager of Jack in the Box. next to none drive for Uber.

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NO INTEREST

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You wonder, how does someone spend 5 years at University studying economics yet never heard of Milton Friedman or Keynes. Or how they could be studying film as an African and never seen a Spike Lee film? Another one is studying media and broadcast yet when left with remote controls in a living room could not get the TV, DVD player or amp on. They did not understand the concept of an amplifier–but they are studying media and broadcast. When challenged on why they did not understand it. They replied: We not doing practicals yet, that is year 2.

They are into poetry but read no poetry. Scriptwriters that read no scripts. This is the state of things. And Chris Hedges does the topic so much justice there is no point trying to go through it all again, suffice to say interest in education is a paycheck and that is the last stop for most. How can you as a documentary filmmaker have the chance to work on a documentary with others yet no be bothered at the opportunity? It is because they honestly do not care. Some of them are social workers because their girlfriends randomly picked the easiest degree at uni.  When you ask them are they keeping up-to-date with the latest journals they have no interest.

Maybe it is just me. But I am hanging out with a media professional from our parent company Halaqah, multi-award winning company, and we bump into a girl that said she is studying media and at NO JUNCTION does she even raise the issue of media while in the company of the media professional who she is sitting there watching doing camera and photography work. Not a peep.

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STUPID DEGREES

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Dear young people, pick a degree that has some real-world value. Don’t waste your parent’s money on these silly degrees that have no serious real-world applications. I just cannot fathom spending all that money on going to a university to learn how to be a radio personality or hotel management, these are not serious skill-based subjects. Even filmmaking, 90%, of the people I know winning awards for films and making serious content didn’t go to uni. Get a solid education in some nation-building subjects. Because how can you do 3 years of say filmmaking and come out and don’t know anything proper about filmmaking..what are they teaching these kids?

Next thing I am pumping gas and I notice the sister is speaking some beautiful grammatically correct English. Did u go to uni? Yeah. So why are you pumping gas? Oh, I studied international relations but couldn’t find a job. What do you expect? Better study welding or boiler repair. What the hell is international relations? Who is advising these kids? Their friends. They want easy work at uni and pick silly hobby-like subjects without spending two seconds asking what is the viability of this Facebook-type degree. Don’t they know University is a business and they create these ice cream degrees for rich people with money to waste? Just because the degree looks sweet does not mean it is sweet. How can you go to university to study social media in the middle of Africa? Who is going to hire you? Yet they study social media and cannot even do a proper C.V. in word. They study IT and cannot find the letter A on a keyboard.

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EDUCATION IS A BUSINESS

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Educational institutions are money-making institutions, like everyone else. They are in business to make money first. (most of them). Just like your bank, and everything else in your life you need to know that. So just because a uni offers a course does not mean it is good for you. What unis are realizing is that traditional subjects not making money like nonsense degrees. So they create these “degrees” in all kinds of rubbish subjects tailored to appeal to the ‘want over need’ mindset. You can go and even study social media. What is on the curriculum? The history of social media. So when you graduate tell me how that information is going to work out in the real world? You know the history of social media yet they forgot to teach you how to make money from social media. So you graduate full of theory yet do not know how to do any backend integration. The university created a subject to take the money of lazy people who do not like hard work. Imagine doing a degree in sleeping all day. Real cool until you need a job. Ph.D. in uselessness.

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ROYAL JELLY

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Some bees are trained to lead, and the difference is in the “education’ While all bees are born equal, future leader bees are fed a special food called royal jelly. And that makes them different. They fly off and start their own colony. Education is the same.

People often look at name brands as having more value. And for the greater part of the day, this is true. Julliard’s and Harvard have prestigious names in education. And one component of that prestige that is real is the results that come out of those institutions. Miles Davis went to Julliards and so did Wynton Marsalis, and a whole heap of cats. All these prestigious institutions retain their prestige by quality control. They handpick the best of the best and ensure certain standards. So even if Harvard had the same resources as less known institutions just the process of handpicking the best of the best would always ensure Harvard lives up to its prestigious name.

But there is a dark side to these prestigious institutions and how they maintain 100% pass rates and genius at the top. They do so by culling the weak. So it is like natural selection where all the students in a class are the best of the best. Then the outcome is very easy to secure. That slacker that will lower the class score in normal schools simply is not there to mess with their averages. Sometimes you wonder how much of it is good teaching verse cherry-pick a class of high performers.

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GET INVOLVED

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Black homeschoolers account for roughly 8% of this population, up from an estimated 4% in 2007. The 8% in 2016 represents 132,000 black homeschooling kids, according to the NCES data.

Before you get involved you better get yourself an education. And that happens concurrently with the education of your child. As long as you know you are the main person responsible for your child’s education, get hold of resources and teach your child at a rate they can consume. No point pushing them beyond their means, not every child is destined to understand E=Mc2 but it is your job to discover their potential and make sure you allow them to reach it. Even if it is not an academic potential. The problem with the school system is they are not looking at your child as an individual with a unique potential. They are just a cheap production line interested in bulk. Your child is special only to you, so look no further than you. After that brainwashing institution called “education” set up a routine and teach your child their ABC, or numbers or whatever.

Make sure the TV they watch is mainly educational, read to them. Supplement learning with creative activities. It is beyond the scope of this article but everything you need already has been written about, go search for it.  All the tools homeschoolers use are available at your disposal. And under no circumstances assume that something is too advance because of a child’s age. That is one of the greatest lies ever told. A child at 4 can use a computer and play advanced video games. Some play Hancock and Monk on the piano as seen on YouTube. In short, their potential not your narrow opinion about their limits. Open the door and let them shock you.  All children are gifted in their own way– find your child’s potential and explore it.

 

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CONCLUSION IN SHORT

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.

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The short and painful truth from a lot of research on education (even private education) is you better be supplementing that education your kids are getting in the school system with a homeschooling agenda (if you cannot exclusively do homeschooling). This is not being offered as our opinion, this is a statement like those 10 things Moses received from heaven. This article is sub-titled KILLING FIELDS, I think now you know why. We trust these institutions with our kid’s education and they are carefully making them zombies for a film called the Living Dead! And most of them do not know, because they have inherited a pedagogy that is yet to tap into the potential of our children and truly deliver a holistic education. Some parents complain that they do not have time. Maybe then they have time for failure. Because if you study any parent’s schedule, as we have, it is not a question of having the time or not — it is a question of priorities. Catching up on Whatsapp status or reading to your child. Watching football all day — or teaching them abc. Like many things, it is all a choice.  You know your limits, and you know your priorities. Do not for one second lay the blame of a bad education on the system, now that you know the system has no duty towards your child attaining the best they can be —that is your concern exclusively.

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RESOURCES
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• The Homeschool Alternative: Incorporating a Homeschool Mindset for the Benefit of Black Children in America Paperback

• Homeschooling and Working While Shaping Amazing Learners
• Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle by Chris Hedges 
• The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter Godwin Woodson and Tony Darnell
• Parenting practices around the world are diverse and not all about attachment