Where is our love of learning? "we must destroy all of our self-imposed barriers"

St. Petersburg Times ^ | November 9, 2003 | Bill Maxwell

[Cincinatus' Wife]

A cry in the black education wilderness

[patj]

This comes under the heading of "duh". How can they not see that or know that?

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Exactly.

[RAY]

Thanks again!

[PGalt]

Good post. Thanks.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Bump!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

***Many will disagree, but I believe that education/learning should become our new religion. If anything is to consume our time on Sunday morning and the rest of the week, it should be instilling in our children the love of learning. Our churches literally govern many of our lives, persuading us to take certain courses of action and convincing us to hold certain beliefs. ***

Better than bashing conservatism and looking for excuses. Articles like these are running regularly now. I've posted a lot of them at the LINK in Post #1.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the link and your efforts to educate by your posts. Learning...it's one of the many reasons I enjoy waking up every day.

[monocle]

What you think is obvious may not be so. Look at the frontpage of many local newspapers as well as nationally distributed newspapers and over a period time you will see sport stories outnumbering education stories twenty to one. the same holds with this forum with threads relating to sports and the entertainment industry vastly outnumbering, both in numbers and length, threads relating to education. National spelling bees and geography contests are the closest this nation comes to promoting the importance of education and this miserly attemption pales to tne national audience for the merely for image Oscar awards or the Super Bowl.

To me it is far less obvious than you would have us believe.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Learning...it's one of the many reasons I enjoy waking up every day

Dittos!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Our national space program inspired students and they went into math and science fields. Now NASA is searching for a mission and education is floundering.

A return to the Moon to stay, would give them both new life.

November 6, 2003 - Senate Hearing on Lunar Exploration

[Free Vulcan]

Africans love learning, in society there the more doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc you have in your family the more prestige you have. The parents will put the oldest child thru school, and as each graduates and gets a job they put all the rest thru. I think only the Jews are more obsessed with education than the Africans.

Old school blacks here in the US valued education, reqardless of social status. The despising of education by the majority of blacks is a recent thing, the product of socialist liberal policies since the Great Society. They think getting an education is acting white, when in reality not getting an education is basically white limousine liberals putting the blacks back on the plantation, with people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton serving as their race and poverty pimps.

[Blue_Ridge_Mtn_Geek]

You're quite correct. Anyone who thinks this anti-learning attitude is peculiar to black culture (non-culture?) has their head in the sand. While US graduate education has a lot to offer, too frequently (especially in the math and science related disciplines) the majority of advanced degrees are earned by foreign students. And American undergraduates routinely gravitate to "fluff" majors with minimal intellectual challenge and maximum opportunity to slip through to their BA with pure BS.

Getting "the credential" and getting out is the goal for too many, and they are acquiring this 'get my ticket stamped and get out' mentality from their primary and secondary education experience. Student's intrinsic love of learning is flushed out of them by the time they get through the third grade and, absent strong countermeasures at home, it never returns for most of them, even when their formal schooling is over.

[anniegetyourgun]

"Many will disagree, but I believe that education/learning should become our new religion."

"Education" is already a religion in this country. The temples are government schools and colleges. The high priests are from the NEA and liberal university faculty. The sacrament is conferring meaningless sheepskins.

I think the author probably should have left out the word "education" and emphasized "learning." However, even that has become a doctrine in this country....as long as it is the politically correct "learning."

[patj]

I do think that it is obvious. Parents should be the ones instilling this, not the newspaper. Immigrants that could not speak or write english made sure that their children got an education so they could better themselves. Most parents want to see their children do better than they did.

[kittymyrib]

The most recent statistics are showing that this poor attitude toward learning is rapidly infecting white boys as well. Check it out...

[metesky]

bttt

[alwaysconservative]

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for posting this most FASCINATING article showing Dr. Spudis' testimony! This is a "must read" for anyone who wants to see our country flourish in the future as a technological, educational, and economic superpower.

[monocle]

In your desperate search for obviousness, you fail to miss my point. Newspapers, television broadcasters and the like respond to the interests of their readers and viewers and thereby by reflect what is important to their audiences. Your use of the word "duh" somewhat mirrors this general apathy towards education. Flippancy on a serious subject is more telling than you would imagine.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Something went haywire here in the Sixties.

Bill Maxwell: The blacker-than-thou paradox divides*** When I entered college in 1963, the term "black power" was becoming popular on campuses with black students.

At first, it was used as an ideological umbrella under which so-called nationalists, culturalists and pluralists of all stripes were grouped. Gradually, we students used the term to convince ourselves that by uniting as one people, by loving our history and traditions, by pooling our vast resources, we could become a powerful bloc that could influence -- if not change -- the basic nature of the United States and thus improve our status as citizens.

I remember those days well, a heady time when African-Americans took education for granted as the sure route to self-improvement and the subsequent uplifting of the whole race.

On my tiny Texas campus of fewer than 1,000 students, only fools refused to read and study diligently. Only fools destroyed their brains with drugs. Only fools physically hurt their brethren. In fact, "being smart" was in. We called it being "heavy." We even expected jocks to be heavy. All musicians, especially the jazz types, were heavy.

Black power meant just that: being black and powerful, being armed with education and the drive to improve our lot in a hostile environment where the very concept of racial egalitarianism was still alien to most white Americans. Black power meant sharing the good and eliminating the bad.

In time, the concept of black power changed. Instead of being a sentiment that united us, it became a source of deep division. Those who followed Martin Luther King and his nonviolent movement, for example, were not as black as those who followed, say, Malcolm X's philosophy or that of the fearless Black Panthers.

No longer bringing us together, black power had become a negative litmus test for one's degree of "blackness." We had entered the "Blacker than Thou" era. On campuses nationwide, black students separated themselves into enclaves.

Groups whose members adopted African-sounding names, perhaps wore dashikis and other African garb and spouted words by the likes of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver were blacker than those who majored in business and talked of Wall Street.

If you could quote from Frantz Fanon's book The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution That Is Changing the Shape of the World, you were one black brother or sister.*** (more at LINK)