Education For What?

Education should cultivate the human agency to aspire to its highest capabilities.  This perspective on education fosters a quest in life of a virtuous will to justice through scientifically enlightened material action, which is the recipe for destroying unjust social structures and constructing just ones. African people's education should have two specific aims:  character-building and technical knowledge, morality and science, wisdom and technology.  In other words, working class Blacks need to have scientifically enlightened behaviors and morally sound dispositions for elevation. Thus, the only education for working class Blacks worth having is one that enables them to assert, affirm, and assure their justice in the world.  Running around worshiping Arab and white conjured up gods, devils, and myths is useless to this period. 

At this juncture, mainstream educational institutions in America are not fortresses of intellectual and moral heritage for the promotion of justice.  However, the science, engineering, technology and technical know-how offered-and much of it is meritorious--must be conjoined with sanitized African history and a clear system of morality (right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust).  Whites and Arabs cannot teach us this.  Using fancy wording and misleading mysticism they lie, fabricate, falsify, distort, cover-up, deliberately confuse every time.  Their path to knowledge is a maze for us.  This is deliberate.  But we can overcome it if we prepare as the Chinese and Japanese have.

What should philosophically underpin education in America and the African world  are the three immutable laws of Maat:  (1) everything is interconnected and in a continual state of change, (2) the material world predates us and exists outside our minds, and (3) with will and scientific knowledge, humans can know and alter their material and moral states.  In other words, working class Blacks can be empowered educationally through Maatism, which is a theoretical basis for the comprehension of the interaction of material and spiritual wills as opposites that interpenetrate one another as well as provides an organizing framework for facts, reflection, and scientifically enlightened activities.  You don't need a slavemaster's god. 

Educationally, African Americans have precisely the same pedagogical challenge today that they had 100 years ago, only the specific content differs, reflecting new socioeconomic realities.  In 1898 Dr. DuBois asserted that,

• "We should seek to know and measure carefully all the forces and conditions that go to make up these different problems, to trace the historical development of these conditions and discover as far as possible the probable trend of further development."

Thus, be they the enslaved or the working class, Blacks have historically had the necessity of systematically summarizing the intextuality of their social, political, and economic injustices in a historical context.  A social problem, or social phenomenon in general, can be understood and summarily destroyed at its root by first starting with the study of its emergence, maturation over definite and identifiable evolutionary stages, and conducive or in-conducive  environmental impacts.

Such a pedagogical approach places any people (Black, white, yellow, red) at any historical juncture in position to know the social order in which they are immersed historically and contemporaneously, but also futuristically.  That is, a people can know their social order's trajectory and then make critical interventions to one's liking.  Black resistance frameworks have dealt preponderantly with contemporary and historical White oppression and concomitant Black expressions.  Maat, on the other hand, in addition to these two-though even more scientifically and trenchantly-also predicts the future with the most objective data and techniques available to help empower a people to take command of that future. They have building because they know how to build them; we had pyramids of 40 stores, 2.6 million stones, 2 tons per stone---because we knew how to build them.  The science of engineering is central to construction.  They have cars because they know how to build them; we don't.  Nations, states, cities, farms, planes, trains, hospitals, universities, computers, robots---all need to be built out of the raw materials of the planet.  Those who know how, have them.  Those who do not are beggars and impoverished.