You say that you are the “most vilified man” in the country’s education system today. Why?
Because I don’t think it’s the job of educators, whoever they are, to say we are going to educate your children. The most important educators in a child’s life are his parents, peers and community. Those are the people who can make a child want to learn.
It doesn’t matter if your teachers are from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, if you don’t want to learn you’re not going to learn. If your teachers are like my grandmother, who only had an 8th-grade education, my grandfather, who only had a 3rd-grade education and was a cotton picker in Georgia … these are the people who taught me to want to learn. Schools are ill-prepared to teach children to want to learn.
So do you think that the U.S. has a poor education system?
Education is one of the few areas that I know of that really hasn’t kept up with all the change that has happened in the world. They might have some laptops in the classroom, but the people who teach have the same mindset that people taught with in 1809, when the American education system was created. They’re still thinking, “I’m the teacher, I will stand at the front of the classroom and you will listen to me.” That’s not education.
One of the things we try to do at Black Star Project is evolve a modern education system based on education for life, not theoretical knowledge. Who cares if you know when the Civil War ended? What’s important is if we can educate a child to understand how to rebuild their community. On that subject, we’re not even trying.
Having worked with these young people for many years, how do you think they respond to this problem?
There are two kinds of kids I come into contact with. Some don’t know the deck is stacked against them, and they’re pretty bad.
And then there are the ones who do know, and for them all bets are off. They know that if the deck is stacked against them, then they’re going to do whatever they can to even the playing field. And they do, sometimes [by doing] terrible things. It’s more than an education crisis, it is a catastrophe, especially in the African-American community.
The NAEP’s study that showed only 9 percent of Chicago’s black boys at 8th grade are proficient readers is a tragedy. Nine percent is predictive of the violence that you see here, the despair that you see out here.