It follows that philosophy, culture, and education has to be kept separate from money thinking and a “market mentality” and the “market ethos” in order to maintain their validity and veracity and legitimacy. And given that money thinking and the “market mentality” and “market ethos” pervades the entire system, it necessitates the separation of philosophy, culture, and education from such a system. As W.E.B. DuBois argued, such a system does not educate. Rather, it is a system whereby those who are seeking an education are “crucified.” He wrote:
“If the public schools of Atlanta, Nashville, New Orleans, and Jacksonville were thrown open to all races tomorrow, the education that colored children would get in them would be worse than pitiable. It would not be education. And in the same way, there are many public school systems in the North where Negroes are admitted and tolerated, but they are not educated; they are crucified.”
Education must therefore be kept separate from the system in America lest those who seek a real education “will not be educated.” Moroever, educators and propagandists – particularly those who are people of color – must also maintain their immunity from the allure and enchantment of elite academic institutions. To borrow from DuBois yet again:
“There are not many teachers in Negro schools who would not esteem it an unparalleled honor and boast of it to their dying day, if instead of teaching black folk, they could get a chance to teach poor-whites, Irishmen, Italians, or Chinese in a ‘white’ institution. This is not unnatural. This is to them a sort of acid test of their worth. It is but the logical result of the ‘white’ propaganda which has swept civilization for the last thousand years, and which is now bolstered and defended by brave words, high wages, and monopoly of opportunities. But this state of mind is suicidal and must be fought, and fought doggedly and bitterly: first, by giving Negro teachers decent wages, decent schoolhouses and equipment, and reasonable chances for advancement; and then by kicking out and leaving to the mercy of the white world those who, do not and cannot believe in their own.”
Most essential are the character and personality attributes and qualities such as effective knowledge, sympathy, and truth that need to be instilled through education and pedagogy but are no longer instilled by elite academic institutions. These character and personality attributes and qualities “outweigh all that the mixed school can offer” as DuBois contended. Moreover, such an education is not merely tailored for pecuniary aims and goals, but rather, and as Durkheim contended, such an education is “the means by which society prepares, in its children, the essential conditions of its own existence.”
We are in a sense educating ourselves and others out of an existential crisis. Such was the aim and goal of education and pedagogy all along, namely, to get out of an existential crisis. Durkheim sought to define the word “education” in the following manner:
“Education is the influence exercised by adult generations on those that are not yet ready for social life. Its object is to stimulate and develop in the child a certain number of physical, intellectual and moral states which are demanded of him by both the political society as a whole, and by the particular milieu for which he is specifically destined…”
And to conclude with what DuBois inferred from his observations of the overall education system in America, education had to be kept separate from the system because the system was more concerned with global conquest than with the existential crisis that has now emerged as a result of pursuing such an absurd goal and out of which we must educate ourselves and others.
Adam A. Azim 