Building An Educational Culture that Becomes a Legacy in Each Black Family
Frank A. Jones
1.30.06

In our western/global economy, education is the surest and most direct path any person or people can take out of poverty and into a more comfortable life. Yet this is a fact that has not  permeated the culture and the psyche of many in Black America to the extent it should. 

Just a few days ago, I was in a female juvenile detention center and heard a teenager stoutly say, wrapped in an overpowering ignorance,   College is overrated, and that she doesn't want to go to college; she could do well without college.

Although this girl was in a juvenile detention center for misbehaving, the attitude she projected is one that lives among too many Black youths inside and not inside those facilities. Since this is an Afrocentric magazine to an audience primarily of African Americans, let's be honest: often that attitude is instilled in them by their parents--sometimes a parent will do so unwittingly and sometimes that parent will do so through callous indifference and gross ignorance. These are truths we need to confront and change!

If this callous indifference were not sad enough, I experienced a very hardworking "friend" of mine also feeding his Black son a similar diet of crippling ignorance: His 22-year old son still lives at home and may be there for a long time because that father tells him and the mother, who is trying to get her son go to college, that he does not need to go to college to have a successful life. He points to himself as an example of one who has made it without having gone to college.

Whereas these attitudes trouble me greatly, they should also trouble any parent more than their youth. Young people are young and untutored by life or anyone having experienced life and extracted sound observations. So they can be expected to hold this form of ignorance as reasonable thought. But parents are given as guides to children because they are supposed to have something of worth to pass on to  children.

Much like the girl in the juvenile detention facility, this father tells his son that college is overrated and unnecessary. And that malformed thought/attitude is giving his son an easy way out of success and into sorrow and a sure failed future. Not only that, but in today's competitiveness climate and world, that father is crippling his son. I am sure that is not what he intends. But his intention is in opposition to what he is doing in fact. An absence of a competitive education would be the first factor used to eliminate a competitor from consideration of a job or a bid if he/she is self-employed and vying for business in any legal sector; when I hire, I want the most highly educated person  I can get. This father does not see the harm of his instructions to his son. 

I have always assumed that every father wanted his children to be more than he is in life; to go further than he goes; to know more than he does, etc.  And why wouldn't a loving father/parent want that for his child? It is natural; it is parental, it is the rightful legacy normal parents attempt to pass down to their seed. Every normal parent wants his child to reach higher levels than he. Or if that parent is a high achiever, he/she wants the child to at least reach his/her level of achievement in education, standing, finance, etc. This  is one way parents live on after they die. This is one way a business can grow. Furthermore, a normal parent wants his child to be able to raise his/her children better than he, to support and guide those children to cope with life  under all circumstances of their world that they may experience all the joys of life and grapple with the disappointments that are common to all people. Any parent who does do have these desires for his offspring is woefully deficient as a parent.

To achieve that end, education is needed today and tomorrow. Education has always been the locomotive that has pulled and propelled humankind from one stage of development to the next. As human beings developed mentally, they were able to see beyond the curtains that ignorance envelops us with and envision a better tomorrow. Only when human beings can envision a thing can we achieve it. That is one of the major powers of the educated mind--to see beyond the present and much further than the uneducated person. The wisdom of the prophet is this: Without a vision, the people perish!

The uneducated man is least likely to succeed today and tomorrow because we no longer compete for jobs and market share against other Americans, we compete against others of the world. We are becoming global citizens who must seek employment throughout the world or make our own employment in a world market. That requires a world- class education that requires a bachelors degree, a graduate degree, and beyond. Gone are the days when a high school diploma meant something to be regarded by an employer. 

The very survival of our children in any comfortable lifestyle appropriate for a healthy, sound family requires an educated people. Dr. Edward J. Valeau has stated that the level of prosperity of any community can be assessed  by the level of their education and the value that is placed on it. 

The life and prosperity of a community is generally dictated by the degree of education it obtains. One need only to look around the country to see which communities are thriving and which are not and then learn their educational attainments. In many instances, the level of education influences the great divide between the haves and have-nots. Thus, it is imperative for all communities, but particularly the African American community, to expand and sustain their commitment to education. (1)

The new global paradigm mandates that the Black Community place more stress on education as a central part of our normality and global citizenry. The nations of Africa are extending their hands to the highly educated Black of America to come back home and help them develop, since we have helped develop America and been given, as Martin Luther King, Jr., once characterized it, a check that has bounced. 

Indeed, the Black Community of America, by and large, has allowed too many deficiencies to continue to exist among us; deficiencies that could be remedied if we would muster up the social or political  commitment to change them. (2)  

Parents cannot allow almost half of our young black males of college age to be controlled  and stigmatized by the criminal justice system (approximately 700,000 are in this category) while one million of Black college-age females are in college, preparing themselves for the new world order. When they have finished school, who will they have as eligible marriage partners? No clear thinking, college educated Black female will marry an uneducated and criminalized man as the father of her children--he brings nothing to a marriage and can give nothing to children. The idea that emotional love is enough has been proffered a bit too often. Such a notion is dilettantish; more than emotional love is needed to develop strong children capable of surviving in a fiercely competitive world.  

We cannot allow ourselves a victimization crutch to lean on. Yes, white America has played unfairly; that has occurred since slavery and it continues to this day. We do not excuse it, nor should we be crippled by it. We must challenge it on every level possible. But until we destroy it completely, it must be nothing more than a hurdle to leap across, as we go for individual success. At the level of education, we cannot afford to let white discriminatory behavior dictate our outcomes; we must structure our children from birth that no maturity can ever be achieved until a full education is gotten. There must be an educational culture in each Black home that is imbibed even as if it were a particle in the air. And that family must take that established educational culture and pass it down as a legacy of education that is passed down from one generation to the next with the force, as it were, of a genetic trait. There must be such a hunger for education that it becomes, as it were, a part of our DNA.

No person can ever know who he/she is until that person has engaged in all the educational endeavors open to all humankind. For until that has occurred, one's mind is not developed sufficiently to even see his/her potential, let alone develop it and become all he/she can be! We should never allow our children to think that academics is something alien to them or too hard for them. Those notions defy our history--a history that is more lengthy than our USA history. Before there was an America, we were majoring in and mastering science, letters, and the great issues of this world. That is a part of our genes.[ Consider the writings of Drs. Henry Louis Gates, Wade Nobles, et al.]

What we have found is that a Black boy who will probably see the insides of the juvenile and criminal justice system can be spotted in school near the fifth grade; at that time his school work starts failing, his attention is torn away to other aspects of society and peer activities that militate against his good. So that time becomes a crucial time to observe and bring in more support for that child. Furthermore, boys especially must be instilled with a love for reading and books early on. As a Black Publisher, I have seen at many of book events that Black males seem to not read books and think very little about that oddity-- generally, they will read newspapers and magazines, but not books, as seen by their failure to browse through or buy books at those events. 

As a college teacher, I know that white men read less than women also, but our concern here is Black men's reading, not whites--and this is not meant to be a comparison by any means, just an observation. Black males need to be taught the value of reading books; they need be socialized into the discipline of reading. Not to transmit this discipline to a  Black male child is to cripple him. The parent who does not transmit that discipline to his son hates him. 

Society has fashioned us to socialize our male children to be active and acting, rather than to be thoughtful, imaginative, sedentary, and contemplative, which would suggest well-read. Reading requires the ability to sit still and discipline the behind if one is going to build the muscle we call the mind. This behavior of discipline must be taught and instilled early or a male child will never develop, look for, or see the value of sitting and reading books. We must break away from society's harmful methods of male child-raising! And there are ways this can be done, but the parent must care enough about his/her male child to wrestle this discipline into him. (3) 

Of course, the child will resist the instilling of discipline; he is a child who only understands immediate gratification. But a parent must recognize and not give up his/her role as the parent who cares about him and and for his significant well being. It is the responsibility of parents to give children discipline, guidance, and direction. When that child has developed into a wise and thinking adult, he/she will thank that parent and make the parent proud. But this can only happen when a child has come to himself--a self that some parents deny their children by never forcing them to educate their minds into educated maturity. Without educated maturity, a child cannot come to his potential. We have thousands of young college age Black males in prison who have never realized and will never realize who they could have been because parents never instilled educational discipline in them.

Of the approximately 700,000 college age Black males in prison and under the justice system's control, most cannot be talked to properly because they cannot think properly. Most have been harmed for life, and many parents did not know where and when to look for danger; many did not know what to do; many were simply tired of wrestling with them and could not see the dire consequences they allowed. Ignorance is a terrible thing.(4)

A parent has to know when a son is out of control. But many parents--especially single parents--have no idea about their sons and some are actually afraid of them because they have grown in size and strength. And because of the size and strength of their sons, they give up control, thinking that control is a factor of size and strength. It is not! They still have control and don't know it.But being afraid, they give up that control that parents have almost innately; once it is given up, the child spirals out of control.

Some years back I was asked to talk with a single parent about her young son. She was a mother who was afraid of  her son because he had become larger and stronger than she was--a natural occurrence. The child would not obey her because she was unwilling to take a chance to save her son, and not willing to take a chance, she was allowing him to spiral out of control. He would leave home even after being told not to; he would do other things that parent forbade; he would not do things she told him to do.

After I advised her on a course of action, and she said, "What if he hurts me?" I asked her if she loved her son; she affirmed that she did. I told her that she had to love him enough to put her physical well being on the line and see if the boy is out of control. I did not believe that he was, from what she had told me and my experience with truly bad boys.

Sometimes, to examine how much love a child has for a parent and how much love a parent has for a child, a parent has to put his/her physical well being on the line. Most parents who are afraid of their boys because they are big and strong and they maintain a mean appearance [Mean Mug] do not know that their young lions are just whelps and that the parent is the lioness that will be listened to. A child knows that he/she does not know his way through life, and that a parent probably does. He seldom will acknowledge this fact, but when a parent resolutely demands a behavior (in that parent's presence) that child will succumb to the parent's wishes. (5) The mean mug some young black males maintain is often a defense mechanism for the outside world to ward off predators.

A parent should know his child to the very core of that child, and should not allow that core, which good parents place in their children before those children even know a core has been placed in them, to change. That core placed in a child at a very early age is the hook/control the parent retains over that child. That core must be re-instilled and examined periodically. Furthermore, the child must be given the rationale that strengthens the core that has been given him. As he grows, others will attempt to instill other cores, or modify his core, which his parents have given him. That is a natural testing that is  needed for his development, but the good parent must effectively examine those other notions and refute the harmful ones. (6)

The friend whom I advised took my advice and came back excited to know that it works. But she had to be willing to put her body in what she thought was harm's ways to save her son. And in so doing, she brought him back to the core she had placed in him and realized that he was not out of control; he actually wanted her to take charge and direct him, as parents should. In Taking charge, she renewed her bond and relationship with him and saved her son.

Parents have the unique ability to imprint a child early on in that child's life so that he/she/they have a core bonding with the child that is unlike any other. For a single Black mother especially, that should never be lost, lest you risk losing a son to the herd outside.  A Black male child is a precious plant that must be nurtured, nourished, watered,  pruned, and fed correctly if he is to grow correctly. 

Since there is this peculiar parental ability, use it wisely to instill the expectation, the assumption, the very ethos that without college that child is incomplete, incompetent, immature, not whole, not at his full potential and is a blind person in a sighted world. See to it through precept and example, through expectation, through regular talk about it, through planning for college and talking about that child in future tenses so that he knows there are no options to college and only after college is he/she considered mature and ready to walk proudly and equally on the world's stage. Connect his present to his future; they are one!

There are many other principles to developing this Black education home culture/ethos that I have already written about and that I and others will be writing about in the coming weeks and months. []

F. A. J. 

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1.) Dr. Edward J. Valeau is the President of Hartnell College and a nationally known scholars on education. See his essay quoted from above.

2.) With a Black Gross National Product (BGNP) of some $800 billion, Blacks have no institutional philanthropic foundations to help their own--such as the Katrina Hurricane showed we need--as other western communities have and as we desperately need. Yet when this issue is raised by those who have viable ideas and  methods for building them, only lip service is given and no more.

3.) This is a bending of his wild and unformed will into one that will carry him through life successfully. This must be done early to be successful.

4.)When I was Director of  Juvenile Court in a large California county, I sat in on a case where the child was being taken from a mother because she had whipped him too much in an fruitless attempt to stop the child from wetting the bed. This parent had no idea that maybe the child had medical problems that  could have been remedied by getting a simple prescribed nasal spray that could have stopped the youngster from wetting the bed. Instead the parent spanked/whipped the child so much that the court took the child from her for his own safety. 

5.) This assumes that a parent has behaved responsibly as a mature adult should in the presence of that child. If a parent has let down the standard of maturity and appropriateness before the child, this principle is not assumed. Far too many parents attempt to be friends with their children; a child does not need a parent as a friend, but as a responsible, mature adult. The parent who attempts to be friends with their children, makes a fool of himself and harms the parent/child relationship--a relationship that is needed for a child's sound development. 

6.) A core is a set of values, beliefs, understandings, ethos, methods of behavior, responsibilities, sensibilities, etc., that a parent transmits to his/her child to successfully and responsibly guide him through life. These core values are instilled by word and by deed--precept and example--as soon as the child understands and can see and hear.

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