WHY EDUCATION IS NOT THE ANSWER!

Black folk say: “We need to get educated, that’s our problem! Yea, we don’t get the resources the white schools get, but if our children would only study harder and if we would do a better job at turning off the television more often, then they could learn and get ahead.” To me, this mixes up some important truths with some very wrong conclusions. The truth is that this system has consistently denied a good education to Black children and continues to do so today, beginning with the execution of slaves who taught other slaves to read. Today, the majority of our Black children are confined to prison-like inner city schools which get much fewer resources, the true history and dynamics of our society are covered up, and this leads to little or no attempt to instill critical or creative thinking. These schools send Black children the message, in ways spoken and unspoken, that there is no real future for them in this society. And the real crime is that many Black youth then end up buying into the system’s lies that they are inferior, leading our youth to turn off their own potential to learn, and in doing so, turn away from the wider world of knowledge and science. Just suppose every single Black child somehow did get an education that enabled them to think critically and to master the skills involved in different kinds of mental labor. Would millions of today’s Black’s then be able to get good jobs and climb out of poverty? Hell no! Even if you could somehow eliminate discrimination, so long as the system of capitalism is in effect, people are employed only if some capitalist can make money off their employment. By that standard, there is not a demand for that many technical jobs and even many of those jobs are being shifted to parts of the world where people are forced to work for even lower wages. The capitalists know this of course, and that is one big reason that they are not providing a good education for the Black children in the inner cities. In essence, they don’t want to raise the expectations of Black people too high. They fear a world in which millions of Black people have knowledge and skills, and therefore expect to get a decent job and a better life. Many old school political operatives of the ruling class recall very well the experience of the 60’s, when Black people’s hopes and expectations were raised, and then largely dashed. This resulted in a massive explosion of righteous anger and rebellion among Black people, particularly our youth, and today the ruling class has a deep fear that again raising expectations would be far too socially explosive. Still, unless and until there is a concentrated effort, backed up by Federal power, to actually overcome inequality and white supremacy in every scope of society, not only will educational systems themselves continue to reinforce this, but no amount of education will overcome and destroy it. Even today, when someone Black succeeds against all odds in getting a good education, the discrimination remains. Education alone is not enough; it will take a revolution, in which the rule of the exploiters and oppressors is broken and state power is put into the hands of our people, to thoroughly uproot white supremacy. One of the key features, and necessities, of our new society will be to encourage this creativity and critical thinking among our people, developing their potential and enabling them to increasingly contribute, in many diverse ways, to the development of society, and the emancipation of humanity. As part of building the revolutionary movement, we must fight non-stop against the savage inequalities of today’s education system. And the revolutionary movement itself must educate our people in the real history and dynamics of society, in science, and in the scientific method of critical thinking. But education alone, of whatever kind, cannot solve the problem. Education as “the way out” turns people’s eyes away from the real problem and even leads them to blame themselves when it turns out to be yet another false hope.