When white liberals like Jonathan Kozol walk into urban inner-city schools they can look into the eyes of the children in that sea of dark faces and see that something serious is wrong there. From the anger, from the despondency, from the frustration and from the hopelessness, they can see immediately that there are things missing and they feel called upon to advocate for those students to give them a better educational experience, as best they can.
Part of the problem with what they see, however, flows from something that I have heard for years. It has amused me, in some instances, but I am sure it holds much truth and relevance here. It is said that "when your only tool is a hammer, everything you see starts to look like a nail." This old adage has very serious implications when you go to a see a surgeon about a medical problem. Surgeons cut people open to fix stuff, and a good one can often find something to do inside you that a massage therapist would treat with a back rub, and a psychiatrist might handle by prescribing pills.
White liberals look inside failing schools and see the poor physical condition of facilities, missing or damaged educational materials and equipment and an absence of white children along with the resources, influence and advocacy of their white, middle-class parents. These missing elements are things that white liberals and those blacks who are closest to them understand. The problem is identified as being money and the more vaguely defined uplifting effect of what is euphemistically called school diversity. If there was only more of each, we are to believe that the education of black children would be better and we are told that there are "studies" that have been done that claim to "prove" this "fact".
I would like to suggest that there are indeed some things missing, but that the list above is nowhere near complete. Our efforts to solve a problem are thrown off if essential features are ignored and inessential ones are elevated in importance. In addition to white children, their parents and money, what is also missing, and, I would claim, much more significant in damaging the educational experience of inner-city kids, are meaningful relevant school curricula, culturally and academically competent nurturing innovative supportive teachers who can facilitate a learning process and a close relationships between the school and education process on the one hand and the children's parents and community on the other. Children need to be connected to their own pasts and to their futures. Children tell us everyday that they are bored. That translates into: "I don't see how this stuff you are telling me I have to learn will ever be particularly useful -- and it is certainly not fun."
If we can solve the problem of introducing children to an exciting life of the mind that is linked to things that they are interested in; if we are able to provide an intellectually rich nurturing and wholesome environment that connects children to the people they love and the people who need them and who will grow to rely on them to become the next generation of thinkers and doers, then I think much the rest of education will take care of itself. Children will do the hard work of learning whenever it makes sense to them.
(While I am convinced that education is not and has never been primarily a function of the amount of resources available, there should be a base level below which we do not fall. Part of reason people claim the need for white children and their parents is the view that schools will only have adequate resources if there are white children in attendance. Why? I fail to see any logic in this. Adequate and appropriate resources ought to be the law and that law needs to be enforced. Are we claiming that we live in a society where there can be no such laws or that they can never be enforced? I don't accept that at all. If the claim is that whites are incapable of funding a system for the benefit of all, then why would we trust them to come into our schools and do the right thing for our children? )
Education in the black community during and early on after slavery had a liberatory character. Education was seen as a key to freedom in the fullest sense. Not only was it instrumental to figuring out how to bring about an end to direct bondage, but it was also seen as a means of elevating the quality of life. Children were regularly told that their education was something that could never be taken away from them, and that through education they could connect themselves to all the claims to a good life that anyone else in the world made.
There was a reason that slave-owners had made literacy for their slaves a taboo. They knew that educated people could not be held long in bondage and brutally exploited that once a mind was freed, then the body was soon to follow -- or at the very least you couldn't get a lot of work out of it. The ironic fact is that much of the decline in the relevance and liberatory character of education came along with the addition of more funding rather than the denial of funds.
The first schools that started to shift the focus of education from freedom from oppression to instead fitting into the status quo, were the schools that had a growing amount of philanthropic assistance. As long as schools were in living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms, and as long as children were attracted to them by enthusiastic adult members of the community offering education as a way to uplift the race, they were about liberation. When the money started pouring in it was with conditions. "Industrial education" became the new watchwords and what Bob Moses of The Algebra Project and civil rights movement fame refers to as "share-cropper" education was born. This was an education that was about producing satisfied farm laborers for agri-business, cooks, laundry women, boot blacks and factory workers for the growing industries. A two-tiered education system came into being. Elite white education was about expanding the human potential while black education was about limiting it. The key difference between education for liberation and education for subservience is the issue of who "owns" the educational process and consequently whose needs and interests are to be served.
The transformation of education from what it is to what it should be is not simply or even principally about money and resources. It is about relationships and agency. We are wasting too much of our time and energy on doing what is peripheral and unnecessary rather than figuring out what is really needed and finding ways to provide that. I will be writing more soon on what the real tasks are for improving schools.