For years, the people have been under attack, the working people, people of modest means or no means at all. Corporations, not satisfied with their usual profits, their pound of flesh, have moved their factories out of this country to regions where they can get desperate workers to labor for a few dollars a day or less, where there are few or no labor unions, where there are few, if any, laws protecting the worker’s health and safety, or environmental laws.
So we have lost millions upon millions of jobs, many of which paid a living wage, leaving ghost towns around the country, leaving those lucky enough to find employment forced to take minimum wage jobs that cannot support a family, even when both husband and wife are working.
Meanwhile, the gains of the great freedom movements of the 1960s are being rolled back. Racial inequality is growing by leaps and bounds in every area, whether it be the disparities in the level of health and healthcare between whites and peoples of color, including infant mortality, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes; the widening gap in unemployment, income, the foreclosure crisis which is decimating communities of color.
The racists grow ever bolder, while the courts are taking away rights we thought were secure, rights often won in bloody struggle. A million African-American men languish in prison and together with Latinos constitute three-quarters of the prison population. Black women are the fastest rising segment of the prison population. There is a far greater percentage of African-Americans in prison than South African blacks in the worst days of apartheid.
Now we are facing the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s, thanks in large part to the criminal behavior of the big Wall Street banks, pushing people into ever greater debt, gambling wildly with other people’s money until the bubble of their phony transactions bursts–And all of this was abetted by the politicians and all those who were supposed to police the financial institutions. Thanks to the wheeling and dealing of the Fat Cats, eight million more people have lost their jobs. And the banksters, instead of being dispatched to prison, were given and are still being given–not billions–but trillions of dollars, given free money which supposedly is to stimulate the economy but which is being squirreled away for their own profit, and to pay themselves billions in bonuses. Instead of taxing the rich, it is the rest of us who are told to tighten our belts. Money is being cut for essential services–for education, fire protection, bus and subway services, libraries–with all of said service workers laid off in the process. And, of course, these blows land on those who can least afford to bear them, and the disguised cost of living keeps on going up.
And who do they blame for the mess we’re in? Immigrants, of course–and the shiftless Blacks, neither of whom supposedly make any contribution to society…The old game of divide and conquer.
There is not too much new in all of this. The rich have always run the country for their own benefit, starting with the land theft and slaughter of the indigenous peoples, and then the kidnapping and enslavemnent of the African peoples as well as the plundering of Immigrant and Indigenous labor.
Education: A Brief History
From its earliest days, this country has been run by rich white men. Naturally, they have run it to suit themselves, their only interest being to grab more wealth, grab more power, and to make sure that wealth and power never fell from their grasp. Early on they realized that education was vital–education for themselves and their offspring, to be kept out of the hands of the masses, realizing that their security depended upon keeping the masses ignorant. Remember, it was a crime, for example, to teach slaves to read and if slaves were caught learning on their own they would usually receive a bloody whipping. Nor did the plantation elite see any reason to provide schools for the mass of poor white farmers.
There were a few public schools in the north, but the children didn’t have to go and half never attended, being needed to help the family make ends meet. It was the working people who made public education their most important demand and gradually forced it upon the elite.
Back in the South after the Civil War it was the emancipated slaves who created the first public schools for all, including poor whites whose children now saw the inside of a classroom for the first time in their lives. But when Reconstruction ended and the old plantation class took power again, the school year was cut back for all, and a system of segregated & inferior education was set up for Black children, where for every dollar spent on white children, only 10-30 cents was spent on Black children–For the elites needed Blacks to work on the plantations, just as they had in slavery times. As they said openly, made no secret about it, education would ruin their “niggers”, make them dissatisfied with their lot.
In the North, the elite were worried about the immigrants pouring in from Europe, Jews, Italians, Slavs, considered members of inferior races little better than the Blacks, brought in to work in the factories and mills where millions of workers were needed, filling up the disease-ridden slums of the cities, beginning to protest their terrible living and working conditions when they discovered the streets of America were not lined with gold, trying to form or join unions, some in desperation turning to crime.
The schools now were needed to tame these immigrants, to give them a certain minimum of education, just enough in the new industrial age to be of use to their bosses, to be able to follow instructions. And above all, the schools would be one of the chief instruments of indoctrination, of brain-washing children to accept their assigned places in life, accept the existence of huge inequalities and of the domination by a handful over the rest of the population, to instill in children the proper attitude toward their “betters” so that they would be docile, subservient, and not challenge the way society was being run–to train them to believe all was right in the world, natural, God’s will. Among the ways of accomplishing this was the invention of myths about this country’s history, presenting a sugar-coated version full of lies, a history that glorified or whited out the terrible injusticies of the past so as to get the children to accept the terrible injustices of the present. A tracking system was set up, such as vocational high schools for the poor and for African-Americans, while white middle class children were placed in academic high schools, many college bound, the creation of classes for the “intellectually gifted” again filled mainly with white middle class children, while at the other end, setting up classes for the “unteachable” made up of Black and immigrant children. In New York City there were the “600” schools supposedly for those with discipline problems and the so-called stupid, almost entirely made up of Black children, especially Black boys. Then there are classes numbered, for example, 1, 2, and 3; No. 1 for the supposedly brightest and No. 3 for the slowst, where there was the usual racial and ethnic hierarchy. Today, four year colleges and universities are overwhelmingly made up of white middle class students while Black and Brown young people are shunted into the two-year community colleges, if they are lucky, for half are pushed out of high schools before they graduate–pushed out, yet called dropouts.
In New York City, as around the country, public education has–despite the heroic efforts of individual teachers and administrators–been little better than organized child abuse for poor communities, especially for African-American and Latino communities. This has led in those communities to a movement, pioneered by Black parents, to try and reform the system. In the 1960s, half a million boycotted the public schools and there were some minor improvements…
But the basic problems remained, and so there was a movement to have the community and the parents themselves take charge, run their own schools. At that time the teachers’ union was firmly opposed and several times went out on strike against it with the union waging a hysterical, racist campaign against the parents aided by mainstream media: lying about the movement leaders and the community at large. The movement for community control was defeated.
But in order to throw sand in the eyes of the people and to damp down their anger, they set up a system that pretended to give the community and parents a real say in the running of the schools. This was the system of local school boards, but these boards turned out to be nothing but fronts for the union or the politicians and became quite corrupt. These boards were set up to fail and to discredit the idea of community control.
The Present Situation
So today, the schools have been turned over to the Mayor, Mister Wall Street, while the people have been completely shut out. Every administration has continued to embrace Bush’s No Child Left Behind program, a program that guarentees that millions of children, especially children of color, will indeed be left behind. Governments continue to leave the floodgates open to charter schools, enthusiastically backed by Wall Street gamblers who see great opportunities to make huge profits with public money, some of the same gamblers who pushed the country into the present economic depression.
It is no surprise that desperate parents, disgusted with the poor performance of public schools, seeing their children sinking in the quicksand of educational failure, are listening to the siren song of charter schools, which have been sold with all the sickness and false promises in which Madison Avenue specializes. And the people who are promoting charter schools are the very same people who have in the past justified taking away from the public schools art, music, sports, the study of history–everything that truly enriches and stimulates the students. Now they demand that the teachers become drill sergeants and the students be turned into robots churned out for the benefit of Corporate America. The people pushing charter schools are the same people who set up the criminalization of youth of color, and their incarceration of tens of thousands in upstate prisons. The people pushing charter schools are the same people who have been blaming the victim, accusing parents of indifference to their children’s education, accusing the young people of hostility to education when what they are really hostile to is the dull and abusive indoctrination that passes for education.
Rather than destroy public education, we need to make it effective, and schools should become a place where children are nurtured and respected for their wonderful potential, a potential not confined to a privileged few, where conscientious and creative teachers are appreciated, where education is truly public, meaning truly democratic, that is, where the community and the parents take charge, for they have the greatest interest in their children’s success.
Naturally, the elite and the politicians whom they serve are not about to turn the schools over to the community, not without a fight. So it all boils down to power–the power of money against the power of the people. But the power of the people becomes real only when they organize, become active, mobilize such numbers as cannot be ignored, and take the kind of actions as were take in the glorious days of the Black Freedom movement which against overwhelming odds succeeded in ending legal Jim Crow and struggling to win the right to vote. In doing this we must build our own Board of Education, a People’s Board of Education, chosen by the community, by parents, by students, and responsible only to the people. In this movement it is only natural that African-Americans and Latinos will play the major leadership role, for their children make up the majority in schools and have been the primary victims of a historically racist education system.
The future of public schools is in your hands. It must be taken our of the hands of the Wall Street speculators and robbers who see a chance to make a killing on the backs of your children, out of the hands of sleazy politicians who sell their souls to the highest bidders, out of the hands of those who in their arrogance have nothing but contempt for the community, contempt for parents and students, who fear real democracy, and who want to make sure that this unjust, failing system never changes.
The truth is that the Fat Cats and those who serve them are afraid of you, for they know that you have the power to change once wake up and flex your muscles, once you yourselves realize the power that is in you.
So lets get on the move!
