DAWN RITCH DAWN RITCH
REV. MERVIN Stoddart in Florida has written the Editor saying that my column last week, 'A shocking slave mentality', has "crossed the red line". Exactly what kind of line is that, who put it there, and why?
Also incensed was Robert Taylor in New Jersey. Neither of my critics seems to have any objection to discussions about race per se. Just my point of view. Well, both of them need good medical plans, because this column is only going to make them even more overwrought.
In The Sunday Times of February 8, 2004, Dr. Tony Sewell, a black educationalist and director of the Learning Trust wrote: "Until recently there had been a kind of self-censorship operating among black commentators, who risked being pilloried if they said or published anything that was not in keeping with a culture of victimhood perpetuated by black and white liberals. Now we have an emergence, not of black power but its opposite. According to the ideology, racism is not only overrated, but the obsession with it has limited, not freed, black people."
He refers to a new book out in the States by Debra J. Dickinson called The End of Blackness. In it she argues that post-slavery, post-civil rights and post-MTV, if black people in American are at the bottom of the socio-economic pile, it's because they don't know how to be free. Almost like a drug they believe that their lot can only be improved by winning concessions from whites. White minorities, she argues, know how to rehabilitate themselves from any historical guilt while black people are still slaves to the past.
MIDDLE CLASS
When middle-class black people anywhere make a connection to the wider society, they are accused of 'acting white'. It is the accusation that Dr. Sewell describes as "the ultimate 'mental slavery'".
He also noted that John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley in his book Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America, argues that black underachievement in school is not about racist teachers or poverty. He says, "The main reason why black students lag behind all others, starting in kindergarten and continue through post-graduate school, is that a wariness of books and learning for learning's sake as 'white' has become ingrained in black American culture."
At a time when officials in Jamaica are wringing their hands over education's poor health, the Government itself needs to re-examine its own attitude to learning. The one thing learning ought not to be is ethnocentric. An ethnocentric education policy is one which deliberately keeps the children in ignorance. Reading the sayings of Marcus Garvey, for example, is no substitute for the study of A History of Jamaica by Clinton V. Black. Both are Jamaican authors, the latter is white. His book is about all kinds of Jamaicans, not only black ones but white ones and Arawaks too. It's also about conquest, but any information about that is universally regarded as politically incorrect.
Thus are the children kept in ignorance and rapidly reverting to a state of nature. Deprived of the great literary 'classics', and the sublimation of emotion that these encourage, children kill each other in the schoolyard over foolishness.
The Minister of Education's concern therefore rings hollow. Maxine Henry-Wilson, faced with abysmal grades, violence and fatalities on the school ground, says she's going to examine the impact of the wider community on our schools. This is a gross abdication of responsibility for the vile state of the nation's schools.
Nor am I convinced that establishing a new Curriculum Review Committee is the best thing for the future of learning in Jamaica. People have been appointed to it who believe that classical music, among other subjects, should not be taught in Jamaica.
Not only the fact therefore that each teacher has 48 students makes it hard, but most secondary education today is not as good as a decent primary school education used to be. And that's because whole subjects are being censored and written out of the Jamaican curriculum, none of them pornographic. But like Rev. Stoddart, PNP education officials doubtless find the content 'nauseatingly unbearable', and have put a red line through it.
WESTERN CIVILISATION
I don't think that's their job. Their job is not to lock us off from Western civilisation, and then shed crocodile tears when we start to behave like animals. Their job is to emancipate children from the mental slavery which holds that black people must remember that the white man is guilty of enslaving our ancestors, and therefore responsible for us. Well he's not taking the bait, and it's a monumental waste of black people's time. Yet in education everything remains tuned solely to promoting black unity on that basis.
It ought to be no surprise therefore, when it is found that this ideology isn't producing what it's supposed to. No jobs, no wealth, and a higher proportion of us in the prison population than in the general population overseas. Often for drugs, but mostly for killing one another.
But none of this matters to the people who have been peddling the line since Franz Fanon wrote Wretched of the Earth. As Dr. Sewell writes, "A black child who is truly free will develop peer relationships across racial, ethnic and class boundaries."
This used to be the purpose of all education in the past. That was before Americans convinced the British that education should be technical rather than classical. Even in Britain today school children have to chose between studying only two periods of their history, the Tudors or World War II. Education officials there don't think students should know about imperialism or Nelson, who hold unquestioned first place among the great naval commanders of history. The result is that most choose to study World War II and the Nazis, and the education system may be producing too many 'skin heads'. So there has been talk of curriculum review there too.
I find it unfathomable that politicians anywhere can take decisions on education, the sole purpose of which is to create citizens who know nothing that they might find emotionally inconvenient. By depriving them of some aspects of their history, the Government's objective is to make them docile and tractable.
This has not worked out. Discipline and values have declined in Jamaica, and worst of all the people are unhappy because of it. People require balanced leadership in order to feel secure.
And so the Patterson regime throws up its hand in this and countless other ways. When they can't blame racism, they blame the Jamaican people themselves. But they are the ones who should have insisted long ago that there was more to life than Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley.
