“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”
~Martin Luther King, Jr.
Those thought-provoking words are from Martin Luther King’s contribution to his 1947 Morehouse College newspaper entitled, “The Purpose of Education.” His words encapsulated what many would come to define as education’s essential functions. After all, wasn’t it the dream of every parent to see their children achieve that which they themselves could not? As a result, for many years, we have entrusted our offspring to a system of learning with teachers who could take our children beyond our own limitations.
At one time, most of us took solace in leaving our kids in the hands of a system we trusted. Yet, over the last quarter-century, the trust has wained. Today, a great many parents are not so certain the U.S. education system is “building character.”
In a recent article by the NY Post, editorialist Paul Sperry offers this: “An elite Manhattan school is teaching white students as young as 6 that they’re born racist and should feel guilty benefiting from “white privilege”, while heaping praise and cupcakes on their black peers.
Bank Street has created a “dedicated space” in the school for “kids of color,” where they’re “embraced” by minority instructors and encouraged to “voice their feelings” and “share experiences about being a kid of color,” according to school presentation slides obtained by The Post.” Meanwhile, Sperry goes on to write, “… white kids are herded into separate classrooms and taught to raise their “awareness of the prevalence of whiteness and privilege,” challenge “notions of colorblindness (and) assumptions of ‘normal,’ ‘good,’ and ‘American’” and “understand and own European ancestry and see the tie to privilege.”
In her 2020 New York Post opinion piece, “Public schools are teaching our children to hate America,” Mary Kay Linge quotes education scholar Michael J. Petrilli: “In many schools, you are more likely to encounter the 1619 [project] or [Howard] Zinn version of history than anything positive,” he said. “We’re telling our young people that America is racist and oppressive and has only failed over the years to do right by the most vulnerable, rather than that we were founded with incredible ideals that we have sometimes failed to live up to.”
Story continues at: Teaching against MLK
