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FREEDOMWAYS                FOURTH QUARTER 1968

and self-control and identity with the society and culture. A reward system which develops in each individual respect for the heterogeneity of culture and cultures, a sense of responsibility for other people, and development of the capacity to make things happen; and (4) rejection of the field of colonialism and dependency for a field of relevancy. That is, insofar as the education of the black ghetto child, or indeed for that matter the education of any child, must be in a field wherein the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains are relevant to the lives of the children, youth, and educational personnel. Do the program philosophy and content and the methodologies go beyond the current myths of the social and behavioral sciences and does the educational program face the present national crisis and does education see itself as a major force for social change for humanism and what is, in fact, education for survival. It is also true that this education must reflect serious and basic concern for lawlessness in our society, for the degradation and attempt to destroy the cultures of people, and for increasing use of aggression, money, and war to solve conflict.

The "new" literature not only sets out to bring the ghetto school up to par with the middle-class school, it fails to take its content from the ghetto itself. It closes its eyes to that passionate cliche of American educators "the study of the life situation" and, while it "steals" much of the format and arrangements from the progressive education movement and its successors, it does not yet have a rationale, philosophy, or conceptualization. It does not have research or other data to account for change which the reading and writing and speaking and listening and problem-solving will induce.

One concludes, then, that the goal of the "new" literature and the programs which derive from it is to educate the black ghetto child so that he will become a black "Anglo-Saxon." It postulates that a black "Anglo-Saxon can or should escape from the ghetto. It ignores the real estate, industry, and financial controls which conspire to block any significant outward movement from the ghetto. Its obsession that black ghetto children and their teachers must be held to the same standards as white middle-class children and teachers is based on the dogma that the black ghetto child must look forward to that tenuous future when, as a black "Anglo-Saxon," he will leave the dependent environment for the white world. Verily, the "new" literature proposes that the black ghetto child become a super-child, lifting himself through reading and language skills to a nobler and greater world of the future.

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