Knowledge is Power

For a variety of reasons the education received by many low-income freedmen is entirely inadequate to prepare them for participation in American society. Indeed, the gulf between their preparation and that of the general population is as great as the Grand Canyon.

Do You Know Who Franklin Roosevelt Was?

How about Leonardo da Vinci?

If you bought a house for $300,000 at 4 percent interest could you calculate how much interest you would be paying a month?

Can you read a newspaper?

That is to say, many members of disadvantaged groups cannot satisfactorily answer ANY of the above questions. Their knowledge of science, math, history, and other important academic subjects is woefully lacking.

This initiative proposes to address this education gap in a variety of ways.

The first of these is one on one training for those who are illiterate.

Most citizens in the target group can read, however. For those, the Initiative will organize short 30-minute Zoom classes on topics such as an introduction to classical music, a quick journey through Western art, various topics in history such as the Civil War with site visits organized where possible, art, refresher (or introductory) courses in the sciences and math.

The Initiative will organize reading groups using books such as The 100 Best Books and works by relevant authors such as Tony Morrison.

The Initiative will also be providing disadvantaged freedmen. children remedial education in the form of  private and in-school tutoring in subjects like math, using  world instructors, such as Mary H. Johnson (in math)

BACKGROUND:

Draft op-ed on the deficiencies in the education of inner-city freedmen.

By Edmund Rennolds

Do you know who Franklin Roosevelt is?

That was the question I posed recently to a 30-year-old Black man I met recently.

He told me that he worked at a private health care facility in Washington, D.C. caring for an elderly man suffering from Alzheimer’s.

I was impressed by his professional demeanor and empathy. We talked for a few more minutes. Then, I asked him a question that occurred to me in the course of the conversation. It seemed his knowledge of historical and even current public events was somewhat spotty.

So I asked if he know who Roosevelt was. The answer was clear and immediate. No.

Staggered, I followed up with some questions about the U.S. president who led our nation out of the Great Depression and to victory against Hitler and Tojo. Reginald had heard of Hitler. “Of course,” he said. I said that Roosevelt was the American president who fought the German dictator. Reginald took that fact in and said he would look him up.

Over the course of the past 12 years, I have had a series of conversations with Black residents of the inner city in Baltimore and Washington, where I have made periodic attempts to rehab vacant city dwellings.

I tell you this simply to set the stage for a series of astonishing exchanges with inner city residents of the color of these two great American cities, where the income disparities loom as large as the Grand Canyon.

I am not an expert on education. But I believe that this series of conversations spotlights a catastrophic failure of the American public school system to impart even the most basic information about life in schools to the residents of the country’s inner cities. I am bewildered by this, as I know a phenomenal amount of money has been spent on this essential task in our great democracy. The expenditures in Washington, D.C. have been much higher.

So how would one make sense of a conversation with Mary, a 50-year-old mother of six grown children in Washington? Mary, not her real name, is at least as intelligent as most of the people I knew at Harvard. That is true, but Mary doesn’t believe me, because she has been taught otherwise. That is about the only thing she appears to have been taught in her time with the city’s public schools.

I asked Mary the question that I ask every disadvantaged person now that I encounter, of whatever race or nationality, religion, creed, etc.

Do you think the sun rotates around the earth or vice versa?

Mary said that the Sun rotates around the earth. She was puzzled by the question, as the answer seemed self-evident. I asked if that was her final answer. Now, more hesitant, she said she believed that the Sun rotates around the earth. I did not ask if that belief was informed somehow by reading the Bible, perhaps the account of Joshua holding the sun in the sky so his troops could prepare for the destruction of the walls of Jericho.

We didn’t get into that discussion. Instead, I asked her if she knew what gravity was. She said she had heard the term gravitational pull.

So I gave her a brief explanation of the solar system, a term I am not sure she was familiar with. I am certain, without having tested the proposition, that she could not have named any of the planets, except perhaps Mars, because Elon Musk is planning to send humans there in the not-too-distant future.

I told her what the word “mass” means and described how the sun, with its huge mass serves as the center of the solar system. She was staggered by the notion, somewhat unbelieving, I think.

I have posed the query to probably 100 residents of the inner city in Washington and Baltimore. I don’t think more than 1 or 2 respondents have given me the correct answer. I still find this puzzling, because even if one were completely uninformed and just guessed they would get it correct half the time.

Twenty percent of American adults are functionally illiterate, and the situation may be actually getting worse, as the most recent statistics I have seen show that 30 percent of high school graduates have trouble reading above a 7th-grade level.

The students are just as ignorant about math. Ask a typically inner city resident of Baltimore or Washington this question and see if you can get a correct answer in 10 minutes, or at all. What is 3 x 7?

I learned my multiplication tables in the 3rd grade.

Here is a final, incredible conversation, one which many people find literally unbelievable, illustrating the problems of our educational system in poor Black neighborhoods. I was with a 60-year-old Black male as we visited a house for sale. George works as a landscaper and we have become good friends.

In the course of the conversation, I mentioned something about “communism”. “What is that?” he asked. I almost drove off the road.

George, it turned out, had literally never taken in the word. He knew nothing about the world’s experience with the thinking of Karl Marx, nothing of Stalin, Mao, or anyone else in the Communist pantheon. It was as if history had never taken place.

I recount these stories simply to let you experience vicariously the world in which George, Mary, and George live, a world that is very different from the average high school graduate. These three Americans have been denied a basic understanding of what we generally consider a decent education. It is wrong, and in my opinion, it must be fixed, if our democracy is to survive.