Education that will advance American democracy must first serve the individual citizen.
Among the greatest of all evils that can befall children is to grow up learning that because they belong to a certain sub-population segment, they will be advanced or restricted irrespective of their own merit or effort.
Economic unequals have the most difficulty in becoming true friends, especially if they are from unequal ethnic groups. Poverty is the enemy that interferes with poor children’s and rich children’s feelings of kinship with their opposites because in America the material condition has been fused with attributions of human value. Whether one feels he is unequal at the lower end, i.e., inferior, or unequal at the upper end, i.e., superior, the one is likely to resent the other.
Education is the great equalizer. It is through education that the differences at birth can be mitigated. With a proper education — high quantity and high quality reading, writing, arithmetic, reasoning, and character — human beings can become the most civilized of all animals; but if insufficiently or ill-educated, they can become the most savage of creatures. (From Plato)
When you meet someone you consider to be inferior to you, examine your own self; when you meet someone you consider to be superior to yourself, endeavor to become his equal. (From Confucius)
Children in the upper echelons, if properly educated academically and morally, will gain an understanding of the difference between equality of humanity and equality in material conditions, and that treating people with respect is our obligation if we are to be worthy of membership in human society. They will ask themselves: How should we live together as American citizens despite the incontrovertible fact that circumstances at birth will inevitably give us differing societal resources that place some of us ahead and some of us behind?
Tragically, America is building a permanent income-driven under-class and upper-class society. Income correlates with education: the higher the education, the higher the income. America’s students in the top income quartile now complete a BS degree at a 74% rate but students in the bottom quartile finish college at a 5% rate; and the gap has widened over time.
The poverty rate for ALL Black children is about 40%, and for Black children under five-years-old, the percentage below the poverty line is nearly 50%. Black children are nine times as likely as their white counterparts to live in high-poverty neighborhoods.
America’s treatment of lower echelon children is criminal for it injures the development of the assets they need for intelligence, character, morality and income. Thus, no one should further injure the children when they come before us with deficits in the assets they need for success; they did not self-inflict. As soon as they are old enough to understand their “less-than” status and their chances for success, poverty-stricken children are considerably likely to resent a nation that allows such inequalities to exist. Material poverty can easily become spiritual poverty.
The quality, quantity and extent of education can raise poor children out of that condition, if they understand, accept, and can act on that reality. They need to know that there are more than 4 million Black people who earn more than $100,000 annually. The driving force for the economic status for the overwhelmingly majority of the Black wealthy, only one or two generations out of poverty, is educational attainment, not sports, music or other entertainment categories.
Unfortunately, the children are very likely to withdraw from teaching-learning processes that would improve their chances for success if they think that the rules are unfair; that their disadvantages are a result of inherent conditions which they cannot change; that while doable, the efforts required are much more difficult as compared with people unlike themselves; or that extra efforts will not make any difference when they become adults.
Children will strive to actualize their intellectual and moral potential if we inculcate in them the belief that they will be provided a path to a decent life that is not obstructed with artificial inequities.
In order for children to begin and sustain the effort to excel behaviorally and academically: First, the children must have a well-developed sense of self-respect, self-worth, dignity and self-control; Second, the children must have an abiding sense of the worth of their own people; Third, the children must believe that America understands and respects their people’s value; and, Fourth, children must respect America’s professed ideals, despite gaps between the ideals we profess and the way some people actually behave.
The most harmful deficits are visited upon poor children at birth. Because of success-asset-deprivation, and the interlocking nature of callous indifference, insidious insensitivity, invidious individualism and incompetence in American society, poor children’s deficits worsen over time, especially in their earliest years. The remedy: their communities, including everyone in their lives and who should be, must cooperate in coherent, coordinated, comprehensive, continuous efforts to improve skills and reverse psychological damage. At birth, the great majority of children’s potential is unlimited; but I think America’s will is too weak to advance that potential.
