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CASHING IN ON BLACKNESS:  THE DILEMMA OF AFRO-AMERICAN EDUCATION

NANCY L. MOORE

Dr. WILFRED CARTEY, black educator and literary critic, has said that "any education, any growth of awareness demands its proper sacrifice.  Such is its nature: to create a contrast so startling that the past must be abandoned in favor of the future it promises or the reality it so starkly reveals." ᣳ  In What Black Educators Are Saying, Nathan Wright has attempted to answer the question implied in the title by hastily compiling a mish-mash of articles by an incompatible assortment of writers involved, however tangentially, in the formal education of black people.  The book does not reach any coherent conclusions, ideas that may be shared by the authors are not assembled and developed, and after reading the book the question remains, "What are black educators saying?"  The structure of the book, divided into five parts, seems contrived as though it were superimposed to accommodate whatever materials were elicited.  The scope of each section is not clearly delimited.  The ordering of topics does not appear to have logical continuity.  And yet, this book is found in education classes all over the country because it is available, not because it is the best that black educators have to offer the racial crisis in American education.  Schools of education have finally been forced to deal with what Kelly Miller, then Dean of the Junior College at Howard, asked back in the twenties "How shall we reshape our shattered ideals?... to restate the case in terms of the peculiar and special needs of the Negro is hardest of all." ²  Today is it good business and happy
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1.  Wilfred Cartey and Martin Kilson, eds., The African Reader:  Independent Africa (Vintage, N.Y., 1970), p. 121.
2.  Kelly Miller, "The Practical Value of Higher Education," Opportunity, late 1020's, March, pp. 4-5.

WHAT BLACK EDUCATORS ARE SAYING, Edited by Nathan Wright, Jr. New York, Hawthorne Books, Inc. 286 Pages, $3.95.
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Nancy L. Moore, now teaching at Benedict College, Columbia, S.C., recently received her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Massachusetts.

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