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END RACISOM IN EDUCATION:
A CONCERNED PARENT SPEAKS

MAUDE WHITE KATZ

I AM A CONCERNED Black parent of two daughters attending the public schools in New York City. I am an aware parent. I am one of the thousands of parents-transformed by Sputnik, the resurging African nations, the UN, the liberation forces in the Far East, TV, automation and technological advance and the Space Age. A revolutionary change has taken place in the minds of Black parents. There will be no more resignation and accommodation to the status quo as a way of life for them. Things must change for them and their children. They may not know all the facts about their history, but since Lumumba, Nkrumah and others, they know they have a history. They have roots. They reject the racist philosophy of superior and inferior peoples. They know that racism is used to justify the exploitation and oppression of a people and whole continents for profit, as was the situation during slavery in the South. The same racist philosophy is still prevalent throughout the nation to justify the studied retardation of Black and Puerto Rican children in the public schools of the nation. Exploitation and oppression of the Black people exist now and the school situation is a part of them.
Education serves the interests of those who own and control the economic resources of the country-the Establishment. They decide the quantity and the quality of the education, who should get it and how much. There was a time when the Establishment was ambivalent towards education. Did it serve their best interests? After all, the founders of the great fortunes of the nation were not educators nor educated. They were enterprisers. Education for the laboring classes was inimical to their interests. It was the newly franchised Black man longing for education for himself who fought for and introduced tax-free public education in the South. It was the labor
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Mrs. Katz has had articles published in FREEDOMWAYS since 1962. She is a well-known organizer and civil rights activist.

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