Breaking the World: Mapping Identity, Knowledge, and Power

1. Module 1 Workshop 2

2. The construction of schooling • Breaking • Missionaries • Militaries • Warfare (hostages) • Making • Professional training • Labour/employment (economy) • Law, Finance, Money The production of knowledge Anti-intellectualism The academy Communicating Language Mapping Theories of Self Place, Space, Being Mending the World ... The conception of self (1453) 1492 Identity Authenticity Authority Coloniality Empire Maps Modernism (post-racial) Equalities

3. How we want to be with each other • 10% of what we read • 20% of what we hear • 30% of what we see • 50% of what we see and hear • 70% of what we discuss • 80% of what we experience • 95% of what we teach others...

4. Previous Priorities 1 Listen to Guy Giard’s “Interaction Theories” Workshop & create a cognitive map for it 2 Enquire as to the specifics of your birth 3 Check out this prank 1:30-3:30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZjlDtUWVOI 4 Read as much of this piece on Pedagogy (LINK: http://infed.org/mobi/what-is-pedagogy/) 5 learn or read up on how score A Boxing Match 6 Listen to selected chapters from “For Giving” Genevieve Vaughan 1 Read chapter IV of “Towards the Destruction of schooling” 2 Record a racist joke ready to bring and share with the group 3 Listen to selected chapters from Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt, 4 Check out this token nonwhite lady, writing on pedagogy, who has been included for the sake of gender balance Link: www.edocere.org/articles/marva_collins.htm 5 Bring in a poster or promotional material showcasing ‘anti-blackness’ 1 Read the introduction of Huey Newton’s PHD 2 Read a review of Linda Smith’s book on Decolonising Methodologies 2 Read sections 44-48 of Dubois’ “My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom” 4 Watch The “Not Out of Africa” debate ft Henrik Clarke 5 Listen to selected chapters from The Ascent of Humanity, Charles Eisenstein

5. Teaching as a conserving activity • Bughatti • Credibility • 10 year time line • Quotes • Boxing Knockout • Frank Mir • Bow • Bullet • Mind • Annoyance • Giard / Wynter Mapping

6. Ending the World

7. Jerome’s Niece

8. W O R L D Lil Wayne: “I wish I could fuck every girl in the world” (Every Girl) Future: “Tell me, what you think we hustle for? I just wanna buy the world, Do the impossible Sing it with me now, na na na, What you think we out here working' for? I just wanna buy the world Do the impossible Lil Wayne: “I got ice in my veins, blood in my eyes/ Hate in my heart, love in my mindI seen nights full of pain, days of the same/ You keep the sunshine, save me the rainI search but never find, hurt but never cry/ I work and forever try, but I'm cursed so never mind/ And it's worse but better times seem further and beyondThe top gets higher, the more that I climb/ The spot gets smaller and I get biggerTryna get into where I fit in, no room for a nigga/ But soon for a nigga it be on motherfucker/ 'Cause all this bullshit, it made me strong motherfucker Dinah Washington: “This bitter earth, Well, What a fruit it bears/ What good is love, That no one shares/ And if my life, is like the dust / That hides the glow of a rose, What good am I Heaven only knows/ No, this bitter Earth Yes, can be so cold/ Today you're young, Too soon you're old/But while a voice, Within me cries/ I'm sure someone, may answer my call/ And this bitter earth, May not be ohhhh, so bitter after all Kool G Rap: “It seems like only yesterday, my moms was on my back"Get your butt up out the sack and find a job or hit the road Jack"Black, I don't disown her, I'm just a kid from CoronaWith a G.E.D. diploma, with more ribs showin' than Tony Roma'sIn order to get straight, I gots ta to make a muscleLearned to hustle and bustle and I gave the streets a tussleStandin' down on the corner slangin' fat rocks to bottlesWith the black tops, for cops got my shorty watchin' my back HobbesMakin' mad lucci, bought up Louis Vuitton & gucciHoochies callin' me boochi, while they smooch me, givin' up the coochie

9. E A R T H Kurtis Blow: “My first day in office, the King on the throne/ I spent my first three hours on the telephoneYou know with newsmen reporters, and votes too/I had so many calls, I didn't know what to doYou know out that office I continued to work/I signed so many papers, my fingers started to hurtThen I shook off the pain, say this ain't no thing/ there's nothing in the world like being #1 king! Nas:“Life, I wonder, Will it take me under, I don't know / Imagine smoking weed in the streets without cops harassin' Imagine going to court with no trial / Lifestyle cruising blue behind my waters No welfare supporters, more conscious of the way we raise our daughters Tupac: “Now if I choose to ride, thuggin' till the day I die/They don't give a fuck about us While I'm kickin rhymes, getting to their children's minds /Now they give a fuck about us They wanna see us die, they kick us every time we try /They don't give a fuck about us So while I'm getting high, I'm watching as the world goes by /Cause they don't give a fuck about us Tupac: “The world, the world is behind us/Once a motherfucker get an understanding on the gameand what the levels and the rules of the game is/ Then the world ain't no trick no moreThe world is a game to be played / So now we lookin at the world, from like, behind usNiggaz know what we gotta do, just gotta put our mind to it and do it / It's all about the papers, money rule the world/ Bitches make the world go roundReal niggaz do what they wanna do, bitch niggaz do what they canStarin at the world through my rearview / Go on baby scream to God, he can't hear youI can feel your heart beatin fast cause it's time to die / Gettin high, watchin time fly, ya know Rakim: "You got ambition?" Shorty said, "Man listen/ I got demands for livin, can't stand division Make grands on my mission, till everything glisten/ Women in the Expedition, no plans for prison In a vision the city get, 2 milleni G/Sittin in my embassy sippin Hennesy / Gettin high, and watch life pass me by“ So I asked him why, wit a fast reply He said "I'm livin just to die without any feelings So I wait here for my Maker till it's time to go Wit this dime I know/ Wit all of her girls and all of my mens / Waitin for the world to end“

10. Module 0: How the world was made References (Cognitive Map) Nas (p 323) “I want to talk to you” (1996) “My country” (2001) Bateson Carmichael Baraka Woodson (p 324) 1933 – Korzykski Cesaire (Le Congres des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs, 16/09/56): Wright (April 1955) Fanon Sarte Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom Towards the Human After Man, Its Overrepresentation-An Argument On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project, Sylvia Wynter

11. Vous (Yours) x Nous (Ours) Blowing Up In The World Blowing Up On The Earth The limits of my language mean the limit of my world

12. territories of social exclusion located at the bottom of their respective urban hierarchies, the American ghetto and the French banlieuenevertheless differ in their social makeup, institutional texture, and position in the metropolitan system. In particular, the mechanisms of segregation and aggregation from which they result are also quite distinct. To sum it up, exclusion operates mostly on a centuries-old caste basis that is tolerated or reinforced by the state and by national ideology on the American side, and primarily on grounds of class partly mitigated by public policies on the French side. The result is that, unlike the urban Bantustans of the United States, the deteriorated banlieuesof France are not ethnically homogeneous ensembles backed by a dualist racial division endorsed by the state, and they do not have an advanced division of labor or the measure of institutional autonomy that would support a unified cultural identity. ~ LoIc J. D. Wacquant, (America as Social Dystopia)

13. They Don’t Give a FUNK about us Denied participation in the higher things of life, the “educated” Negro himself joins, too, with ill-designing persons to handicap his people by systematised exploitation. Feeling that the case of the Negro is hopeless, the “educated” Negro decides upon the course of personally profiting by whatever he can do in using these people as a means to an end. He grins in their faces while “extracting money” from them, but his heart shows no fond attachment to their despised cause. With a little larger income than they receive he can make himself somewhat comfortable in the ghetto; and he forgets those who have no way of escape. (104, 105)

14. that ‘American ghettos, those abandoned sites that are fundamentally defined by an absence - basically, that of the state and of everything that comes with it, police, schools, health care institutions, associations, etc.’

15. [the] ghetcolony tradition [is] a pervasive episode of hopelessness and poverty. What was true yesterday is more than likely to be true today. There are the same decrepit structures basking under the sun … the dispossessed men who mill in front of taverns waiting to quench their hunger with anything that can help them escape their pain and frustration… the hustlers, pimps, street men and other social outcasts who serve as models for the young… always the dirty streets where “ghetcolony” children make their home. A home that has an asphalt floor, tenements for its walls and a door which locks them in from the rest of the world. The streets constitute an institution in the same way that the church, school and family are conceived as institutions. They all have a set of values and norms to govern and reinforce their existence… it is an institution because it helps to shape and control behaviour. And it is on the streets where the Black child receives his basic orientation in life. The streets become primary reference because other institutions have failed to provide him with the essential skills he needs to survive in the “ghetcolony.” And for a child to survive the “ghetcolony” he must undergo a rigorous apprenticeship that will enable him to compensate for the lack of guidance from other institutions and adults. He becomes a student of the “asphalt jungle” because that is where he can learn the skills he needs. (p17)

16. This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits to your ambition were thus expected to be settled. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity and in as many ways as possible that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do and how you could do it, where you could live and whom you could marry.

17. The Afro-American, Oct 9, 1982 No institution is teaching us to understand money, economics or credit [...] We are taught to get a job and do what we’re told. Our orientation makes us passive followers. We don’t take initiative. This is antithetical to the business person; he doesn’t listen to the crowds. We come into a situation assuming someone else is the boss. We assume he’s white. When he’s black , we rebel. When one of our own makes it, we criticise. It’s a crabs in the basket mentality where we claw each other . When we see a black person moving up we think, “who does he think he is - he cant do that” [...] We’re conditioned to go to school, get a degree, and then get a good job with lots of benefits. I’d like to see an many people as possible get out of the employee-situation and go be in our own business and do their own thing

18. Identity – Trust – Collaboration • “if you tell a child to get an education if you don’t deal with racism it won’t do any good… and I got blacks all over the country telling me Dr Anderson its time for blacks to put racism behind them… [but] you don’t have the power to put anything behind and the most dangerous thing you can do is to start talking about cutting yourself away from history and the fact of racism … somebody’s been playing games and social engineering… [yet] the dominant white society… used the churches to say that blacks are inferior… those are tales… peoples have been playing games with you socially engineering you manipulating circumstances controlling you… the only way you’re going to get out is by somebody socially engineering you out … we’re trying to go back and understand everything that has happened to black folk…to turn the thing upside down to make you come out of it as a winner

19. Decolonising the economic mind • How different our education would be if we sent our children to schools to create jobs for themselves to create their own economic and political systems. To see themselves as the major sources of their employment… how many jobs are created today by black music? Look at the whole structure of the music industry; from promoters to manufacturers of the records and the tapes… we’re begging for what we are making already. We cannot use our own creations as a source of our own wealth … the creator could not have intended for us as African people to be a poor people if the creator implanted in our soils all the wealth that was planted there …. It seems as if the creator blessed us form the very beginning with wealth and possibility … The wealth of a people is ultimately… in their minds

20. The Shadow of the Panther I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people. For example, I am black. I know that. I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn't know that. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me. So some boys had to write a bill to tell that white man, "He’s a human being; don’t stop him." That bill was for that white man, not for me. I knew it all the time. I knew it all the time.

21. 1492 – 1962 (470) Dialectics of Liberation, July 1967, 15-30 • Ronald Laing • Gregory Bateson • Herbert Marcuse • Irving Goffman • StokelyCarmeichal • Paul Sweeney • David Cooper • Paul Goodman

22. Philosophy, Psychology (Programming) & Psychiatry • Derek Hood in Critical Psychology, 1994 • Erving Goffman, Asylums, 1968 • David Cooper, Psychiatry and anti-psychiatry 1967, (used Bateson et al 1956) • Ronald Laing, The Divided Self 1959, Sanity, Madness and the Family 1964 • Thomas J. Scheff. Being mentally ill: A sociology theory. 1966. • Thomas Szasz, Ceremonial Chemistry 1973, • Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis, 2010 • Robert Guthrie, Even The Rat Was White, 1976 • Robert Thouless, Control Of The Mind, 1929 • Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 1961 • Steve Biko, I Write What I Like, 1967 • Albert Memi, The Colonizer and the Colonised, 1965 • Kazimierz Dabrowski, Positive Disintegration, 1964

23. Penguin Education Specials • 36 children / Herbert R. Kohl (1967) • A hundred of the best / Nicholas Tucker (1968) • A last resort?: corporal punishment in schools/ Peter Newell (1972) • Celebration of awareness: A call for institutional revolution / Ivan Illich (1973) • Children in distress / Alec Clegg & Barbara Megson(1968) • Compulsory miseducation / Paul Goodman (1964) • Teaching as a subversive activity / Neil Postman, Charles Weitenger (1971) • The relevance of education / Jerome Seymour Bruner (1974) • The multi-racial school: a professional perspective / Julia McNeal (1971) • The Hornsey affair: Students and Staff of Hornsey College of Art (1969) • Free way to learning: educational alternatives in action. / David Head (1974) • Dear Lord James: a Critique of Teacher Education / Tyrrell Burgess (1971)

25.  Paul Goodman, p 217 (named as a critic) cf Growing Up Absurd Wendell Johnson, Do You Know How To Listen & Verbal Man the Enchantment of Words (1965) Carl Rogers, On Becoming A Person, p 194 Edmund Carpenter, p 160DVD Oh What a Blow The Phantom Gave Me [cfMcLuhan] Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking Glass (p 132) (1872) Alan Watt, The Way of Zen, 1957 Karl Menninger, The Vital Balance: The Life Process in Mental Health and Illness (1964) [also author of “The Crime Of Punishment”, 1964, 66]] Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 1926, quoted by McLuhan, cf p 167 George Orwell, 1984 (The Last Man in Europe) 1948 John Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding [line] (1689) Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality (p 127) (1970) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Form and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil [line] (1651) Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thoughts and Reality: Selected Writings ed by J. B. Carroll (1964) Aldous Huxley, “Educational on the Nonverbal level” Daedalus, Spring 1963 JurgenRuesch, disturbed communication: : The clinical assessment of normal and pathological communicative behavior, New York, W. W. Norton, 1957, (cf ... Ruesch, J.; Bateson, G., Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. 1951 W.W. Norton) John Dewey and Arthur F. Bentley, Knowing and The Known, 1949)

26. An the list goes on • John Gatto • Marimba Ani • Erica Carle • Charlotte Iserbyt • Bel Hooks • Amos Wilson • Jerry Farben • James Loewen • James Webb • Jonathan Kozol • Godwin Woodson • John Holt • Paul Goodman • Jan Matthews • Ivan Illich • Neil Postman • Paulo Freire • Jeff Schmidt • Michael Porter • Marva Collins

27. The Underground History of American Education (2000)

28. “... a perspective can be revolutionary only if it identifies” • Chapter 1. The Role of Schooling in Society • Chapter 2. The History of Schooling • Chapter 3. Theories of Schooling • Chapter 4. Notes on the Poverty of Student Life

29. In-Quiz-itision Time • 1. Who were the ancient Greeks? Where did they come from? How did the Geography affect them? • 2. Why was Athens the leading city in Greece? What is a city-state? • 3. How many languages were spoken in Greece? How did this affect Greek life? • 4. What sort of religion did the ancient Greeks have? How does this compare to that of the Egyptians?

30. From Athens to Memphis • How were the Egyptians affected by climate and geography of their country? Discuss the following in your answer: • An oasis • Living in a desert area • Irrigation • Delta • Safety from warring tribes

31. From Athens to Tennessee • What were some of the ways of earning a living in ancient Egypt? Include the following in your answer : • agriculture • Manufacturing • Education • Government jobs]any others you find in your reading

32. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speech at Stanford on April 14, 1967. "The other America". Now there is another myth and that is the notion that legislation can't solve the problem that you've got to change the heart and naturally I believe in changing the heart. ...[I] feel that that is the half truth involved here, that there is some truth in the whole question of changing the heart. We are not going to have the kind of society that we should have until the white person treats the negro right - not because the law says it but because it's natural, because it's right and because the black man is the white man's brother It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can't make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important also. And so while legislation may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men when it's vigorously enforced and when you change the habits of people pretty soon attitudes begin to be changed and people begin to see that they can do things that fears caused them to feel that they could never do. And I say that there's a need still for strong civil rights legislation in various areas

33. Gatto Critiqued... • The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. They are hardly curious at all about what grown up people really do. The children I teach in fact have little curiosity about anything. They can’t even concentrate for very long on activities of their own choice. • The children I teach have a poor sense of the future; of how today is connected to tomorrow. They live in a continuous present the exact moment they are in being the boundary of their consciousness. • The children I teach have an equally poor sympathy with the past with no apparent understanding of how the past created their present, their values; their surroundings and limited their choices. • The children I teach are cruel to each other; they lack compassion for misfortune even for the misfortune of their own friends. They laugh at weakness; they have contempt for people who need help. • The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candour. The outer personality they develop is borrowed from television shows and other superficial fashions. It was not earned by commitment or by time spent alone in the realm of spirit form which all human uniqueness derives I think.

34. Gatto Critiqued... • My children are imitations; their personalities fabricated from artificial bits and pieces of actors pretending to be somebody that they are not. This patch work disguise is used as a face to present to the world and to manipulate teachers and adults but the secret inner self remains poorly formed, incomplete, inadequate to the common stresses of daily living. Because these children are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided or terminated quickly when they happen… they don’t like their own parents so much and they don’t really have any close friends. They learn to prefer imitation friendships in the form of people they can hang out with and in that way they avoid the obligation of truthfulness that intimacy imposes. The children I teach are strikingly materialistic. They follow the lead I think of school teachers who materialistically grade everything and TV shows which offer everything in the world for sale. When everything has a price nothing can be priceless by definition. The children I teach are desperately dependent. They really don’t know how to do anything at all. They will probably reach adult hood unable to participate as workers, as citizens, or as effective persons in marriage, parenthood or community relationships (the Seven Lesson Schoolteacher)

35. Disciplined Minds

36. The Curriculum of Necessity or What Must an Educated Person Know? • Here’s Harvard University’s list of skills that make an educated person • The ability to define problems without a guide. • The ability to ask hard questions which challenge prevailing assumptions. • The ability to quickly assimilate needed data from masses of irrelevant information. • The ability to work in teams without guidance. • The ability to work absolutely alone. • The ability to persuade others that your course is the right one. • The ability to conceptualize and reorganize information into new patterns. • The ability to discuss ideas with an eye toward application. • The ability to think inductively, deductively and dialectically. • The ability to attack problems heuristically.

37. Towards The Destruction of Schooling (2004) 6 basic functions of school  1) The adjustive or adaptive function.  Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things. 2) The integrating function.  This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force. 3) The diagnostic and directive function.  School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

38. Towards The Destruction of Schooling (2004) 6 basic functions of school  4) The differentiating function.  Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best. 5) The selective function.  This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain. 6) The propaedeutic function.  The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

39. Scientific Dictatorship  The Progressive movement (1890–1930) was philosophically concerned with tailoring education to the needs of the child. Practically, this meant categorizing, observing, testing, and controlling the child to smooth the transition to corporate capitalism. A [.] Purpose or object of ‘Scientific Management.’ 1. To increase the efficiency of the laborer, i.e., the pupil. 2. To increase quality of the product, i.e., the pupil. 3. Thereby to increase the amount of output and the value to the capitalist...[ Schools were designed… to be instruments of a scientific management of a mass population… intended to produce, through the application of formulae, human beings whose behaviour can be predicted and controlled. Because community life, which protects the dependent and weak, is dead, and only networks remain, the only successful people in our national order are, independent [and] individualistic [whereas] well schooled people are simply irrelevant… as human beings they are useless…

40. Staying In The Hold of the Ship  The true goal has always been to increase sociological power . The schools are used to prepare children for this increased sociological dependence If their training is effective, it will accomplish some of the following purposes: 1 . To develop emotional rather than intellectual responses to what are called `social problems 2. To direct emotions toward collective rather than individual or family relationships . 3. To train students toward self-sacrifice rather than self-respect. 4. To convince students that as individuals they are ineffective - that worthwhile goals must be pursued through group effort or under group control . 5 . To idealize distant, long-range and even impossible achievements so people can be bound together in common effort for indefinite periods of time 6. To alienate children from parental influence and Christian moral teaching. The first step in an elementary sociology text, as it is with any seducer, is to build up trust and confidence . Within the first few chapters most of them will attempt to convince their readers that sociology is a science . Few children will question the claim or attempt to look behind the mask . They do not expect to be deceived. Hardly knowing what is meant by science, they accept without thinking. Once they have accepted sociology's scientific mask, they become less likely to question and more likely to accept its teachings as scientific truth

41. banking education maintains and even stimulates the contradiction through the following attitudes and practices, which mirror oppressive society as a whole: • (a) the teacher teaches and the students are taught; • (b) the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; • (c) the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; • (d) the teacher talks and the students listen—meekly; • (e) the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; • (f) the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; • (g) the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; • (h) the teacher chooses the program content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; • (i) the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his or her own professional authority, which she and he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; • (j) the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects.

42. Europeans not only colonized the world, they colonized information about the world" "Decolonizing the Academy“ (Africa World Press, 2003, ed, Carole Davies et al) asserts that the academy is perhaps the most colonized space. As we enter the twenty-first century, this has become even clearer now that the academy is one of the primary sites for the production and re-production of ideas that serve the interests of colonizing powers. Operating at the macro level in terms of the state and at the micro level in various applications, these interests include the organization of the disciplines, the marginalization of interdisciplinary studies, the re-assertion of masculinities, and the operations of class, privilege, and hierarchy.

43. Critical Scholarship Decolonises Academia [Blyden’s 1880] commencement address [Liberia College] grapples with many of the abiding issues currently debated by critical scholars regarding knowledge, power and coloniality. Blyden the Pan-Africanist discussed how to decolonise knowledge with colonial tools; how to relate the knowledge systems of an elite academy to the living knowledge traditions of the indigenous peoples; and how to build ethical and practical relationships between the academy and the communities that surround it.Blyden's context and his concerns are in many ways a microcosm of the global challenges that face those of us who wish to decolonise the Western academy in the here and now. What can we learn from Blyden? And what has (fundamentally) changed?

44. 1492 – 1612 – 1834 – 1915 - 1945

45. 1492 – 1612 – 1834 – 1915 – 1945 ... to distract from a larger picture with far reaching and wider consequences. An article from The Whirlwind, (Issue 4) the Maafa: Afrika’s 500 years of European Terror) revealed: ‘The term ‘slavery’ does not adequately express what Afrikans have suffered at the hands of Europeans, for the past 5000 years, of which slavery was just one stage in this unparalleled, protracted process. ‘[…] [The Maafa] includes 6 stages: Invasion: military onslaught and village raids Conquest: subjugation of Afrikans to the European will Slavery: chattel enslavement Colonialism: colonial (or national) enslavement Neo-colonialism: colonial enslavement by proxy Globalisation: Pan-European global domination (‘New World Order’). The characteristics (of the Maafa), permeating each stage, are: political oppression, economic exploitation, social degradation, cultural annihilation, mis-education, religious falsification, psychological retardation and physical extermination.

46. Thinking Inside The Box

47. Too Little Too Late “Our advanced teachers, like "most highly educated" Negroes, pay little attention to the things about them except when the shoe begins to pinch on one or the other side. Unless they happen to become naked they never think of the production of cotton or wool; unless they get hungry they never give any thought to the output of wheat or corn; unless their friends lose their jobs they never inquire about the outlook for coal or steel, or how these things affect the children whom they are trying to teach. In other words, they live in a world, but they are not of it. How can such persons guide the youth without knowing how these things affect the Negro community? “For centuries such literature has been circulated among the children of the modern world; and they have, therefore, come to regard the Negro as inferior. Now that some of our similarly mis-educated Negroes are seeing how they have been deceived they are awakening to address themselves to a long neglected work. They should have been thinking about this generations ago, for they have a tremendous task before them today in dispelling this error and counteracting the results of such bias in our literature

48. The Miseducation of the Negro (1933) the same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worthwhile, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The “educated Negro” is compelled to live and move among his own people whom he has been taught to despise. As a rule, therefore, the “educated Negro” prefers to buy his food from a white grocer because he has been taught that the Negro is not clean. It does not matter how often a Negro washes his hands, he cannot clean them, and it does not matter how often a white man uses his hands he cannot soil them... this has been his education, and nothing else can be expected of him ( xvii, xix) The Negro trained in the advanced phases of literature, philosophy, and politics has been unable to develop far in using his knowledge because of having to function in the lower spheres of the social order. Advanced knowledge of science, mathematics and languages, moreover, has not been much useful except for mental discipline because of the dearth of opportunity to apply such knowledge among people who were largely common labourers in towns or peons on the plantations. (p 14)

49. The Pedagogy of Huey P. Newton: Critical Reflections on Education in His Writings and Speeches by MATTHEW W. HUGHEY University of Virginia As Newton (1995) wrote in his autobiography, Revolutionary Suicide, During those long years in the Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or question or explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process they nearly killed my urge to inquire. (p. 22) Everything that was “White” became in the imagination of Newton, attractive, while everything “Black” became instantly appalling. Jeffries (2002) explains that Newton’s “experiences in school were characterized by assaults on his self-esteem and led him to believe that being black meant being stupid” and therefore he felt ashamed

50. The Pedagogy of Huey P. Newton: Critical Reflections on Education in His Writings and Speeches by MATTHEW W. HUGHEY University of Virginia First, both Newton’s theory and his style of presentation were at times too advanced and overly abstract. Newton’s oration was usually overly theoretical and figurative. Hilliard and Cole (1993) wrote of Newton, “Huey’s great in small sessions, enthusiastic, intense, funny. But before large groups he freezes; his voice gets high . . . his style stiffens; he sounds academic, goes on incessantly, and becomes increasingly abstract, spinning out one dialectical contradiction after another” (p. 302) Similar to Illich’s (1971) notion of “deschooling,”Newton felt that students had to relinquish the fetish of the schooling process in which they were immersed. Newton wrote, I don’t think students are taught to think dialectically, and one of the reasons they are not is that it would be detrimental to the bourgeois educational system to do so. I think it is a fair statement that the schools are agencies of the status quo: the bourgeoisie needs to train technicians and to give students a conglomeration of facts, but it would be detrimental for them to give students the tools to show that the status quo cannot stand and so to analyze them out of existence.