Common sense and Common Core

12th October 2015   ·   0 Comments

By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor

Have you ever wondered why so many elected officials whose campaigns are financed by some of the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals and political action committees are so diametrically and vehemently opposed to Common Core and other efforts to improve the quality of public education?

The great state of Texas provides an invaluable clue.

Book publishing giant McGraw-Hill said recently that it will rewrite a textbook after a Texas mother voiced concerns on YouTube about the portrayal of slaves as immigrant “workers” in her son’s school book.

It is particularly insulting that this is happening in Texas, the state credited with a historical event that led to the creation of the Juneteenth holiday celebrating the moment when news of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation was finally delivered to enslaved Africans in Galveston, Texas.

After taking its sweet time letting enslaved Africans know that they were free, Texas now wants to write slavery right out of U.S. history like it never happened. While this action has not received much attention in the media, it is tantamount to efforts that deny that the Holocaust took place in Germany.

Imagine how Jewish Americans would react if the efforts of white supremacists like David Duke to deny the existence of the Holocaust found their way into history books. What kind of backlash would there be for the book-publishing company that dared to print such historical inaccuracies and anti-Semitism?

Jewish Americans would not stand for being disrespected and misrepresented in such a manner and neither should Black people. McGraw-Hill and educational leaders in Texas should all be held accountable for their actions.

Such actions underscore why national educational standards like Common Core are needed. Every effort needs to be made to ensure that all children are given access to quality public education and are not at the mercy of unscrupulous education officials who are controlled by rich and powerful people who see nothing wrong with downplaying or denying the very existence of slavery.

There are certainly kinks that need to be worked out with regard to Common Core but those kinks do not justify the wholesale rejection of an educational standard with tremendous potential to put public education in the U.S. back on the right track and allow U.S. high school graduates to compete with their peers in other industrialized nations.

The anti-Common Core movement is but one campaign that aims to undermine efforts to improve public education and keep the masses undereducated and uninformed about efforts by the 1 percent to “turn back the clock” in America to a time when education was only intended for the children of wealthy landowners and the masses were not only prevented from receiving a quality education but forbidden to read, in the case of enslaved Africans.

It is a strategy that kept enslaved Africans in shackles for several centuries and made it difficult for them to lift themselves out of poverty and powerlessness even after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

It is also a strategy that has prevented have-nothings and have-littles from becoming haves in Europe, Asia and beyond.

It’s really very simple: An uneducated and undereducated populace is easier to control, manipulate, exploit and oppress.

Education is a big piece of the empowerment puzzle and a great equalizer with the power to level the playing field in America and beyond. As white Americans become even more of a racial minority in the United States and beyond, taking away the power of education to empower, inspire and uplift the masses will become even more critical an objective for the powers that be if they are going to continue to call the shots in the U.S. and beyond.

The late, great Malcolm X once said “education is our passport to the future because tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”

Thank you Texas for illuminating that point better than anyone or any entity ever has.

This article originally published in the October 12, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.