I’ve been asked to write on education and incarceration, and the linkages between them. I’ve heard and read of the pipeline between the two, but I don’t really agree with this imagery. I’ll tell you why. Several days ago, I received a letter from a young man who dropped out of school, around the 10th grade. Why? It isn’t just that he was bored, but the stuff was meaningless to him. It wasn’t until years later when he heard and read of history, that which he had never heard of in school, it fired and inspired him enough that he got his GED, and is now in college. That’s not a pipeline. For today’s educational system is a prison where bodies are locked within cells, we call rooms, and minds are locked within lies and ignorance, while spirits wither into dead husks. Schools have become places where minds are sent to die.
I’m going to cheat now, but don’t be surprised, for I’m doing what both students and teachers now have to do to escape the travesty and tragedy of the testing mania that’s ravaging schools today under Obama, just as under Bush, to enrich corporate educational plunderers. I’m telling you I’m cheating by leaving my words and going to one of the greatest educators and scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries. I speak of W.E.B. Du Bois. DuBois taught at some of the finest universities in America; Atlanta University, Fisk University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he lectured. But in what I regard as his finest work, Darkwater, 1920, Du Bois described how he lied to his students thus: “I fought earnestly against posing before my class. I tried to be natural and honest and frank, but it was bitter hard. What would you say to a soft brown face aureoled in a thousand ripples of gray black hair, which knells suddenly? “Do you trust white people?” You do not, and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world’s; you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folk are honest, and all the while you are lying, and every level silent eye there knows you are lying, and miserably you sit and lie on to the greater glory of God.” W.E. Du Bois from Darkwater.
From that day in 1920 to this, nearly a century later, teachers lie to children about how this nation really is, and when they do, kids know, and a light goes out in their eyes. Schools become a prison where the truth is in a cell. When you smear mud into the mind of a child, you don’t have to worry about pipelines. That child’s mind is in prison already, the rest but a mere formality. Several days ago, the city of Philadelphia decided to close almost 40 schools. 40 schools! Is that because of a population decline? No, it’s because city governments have plundered school budgets. They have sold out and sold off the public school system, so education equals incarceration. For to imprison the mind is to imprison one’s future, one’s hopes, one’s destiny. A people’s revolution in education is necessary to put a light in the eyes of children again. Freedom Schools must be organized again, and we must do what even the great Du Bois couldn’t do: tell children the truth, for they can handle it. They need to know that what they see, what they sense, what they feel, is real and valid and true. That’s the beginning of education. So let us begin. I thank you. On a MOVE. Long live John Africa. From in prison nation, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are recorded by Noel Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
