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DILEMMA OF AFRO-AMERICAN EDUCATION    MOORE

old and which it is the aim to correct black education to foster? The chaos of the day is the result of people seeking for alternatives to an outworn, degenerate social system. Churchville's article is representative of that chaos. He never defines what his new world will be like, only that we are to pack our bags and take off. It is highly probable that he does not really know the destination.

C. Eric Lincoln has contributed an essay which sets the current issue of community involvement in historical perspective. This is important because "the effects of the past ramify in the problems of the present and produce the terminology (and the unresolved racial dilemmas) which characterize contemporary education." Discussing the history of education and the illusory quality of "desegregation," Lincoln persuades the reader that it does not pay to depend in any sense of the word on white Americans. He asserts that black people have been the only democrats in America; they have fought consistently to destroy the racial caste structure and to fulfill their right to a "relevant" and "responsible" education, one that does not program black children en masse for social and economic oblivion. One of the most popular contentions now current in sociological scholarship is, as Jencks and Riesman have interpreted the Coleman Report, "that the factors determining the continuing differentials which operate to the disadvantage of Black-Americans now derive from segregation by 'class' rather than by 'race,' thus implying a relatively unrestricted mobility and acceptance across class lines for those Negroes who acquire white middle-class habits and attitudes." Lincoln refuses to involve himself with the question of whether or not this new status is different from caste segregation, for "so long as Negroes, who are racially identified, remain at the bottom of the class structure, and their visibility operates to keep them there," one need not argue about it.

One last editorial has been placed by Mr. Wright in the final section of "Community Involvement and Action." Wright's piece is journalistic writing, meant to shape opinion rather than to provide the information by which opinions can be shaped. He takes the position, concerning the crucial issue of who shall teach and manage the nation's schools, that the neighborhood community should control the schools in which its children are educated. A perfectly valid opinion, yet there are many sticky questions to be worked out by hard thinkers before community control becomes a reality across the nation in black communities. Without looking at the politics and economics of educational control it is exhilarating to declare, as

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