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Thursday, April 25, 2013

Too Much Schooling, Too Little Education: A Paradox Of Black Life In White Societies. Written by Mwalimu J. Shujaa

"Schooling is a process intended to perpetuate and maintain the society's existing power relations and the institutional structures that support those arrangements. All societies must provide a means for their members to learn, develop, and maintain adequate motivation throughout their life cycles for participation in socially valued and controlled patterns of action. However, what is crucial to understand for this discussion is that when multiple cultural orientations exist within a nation-state, it is the leadership among the adherents to the politically dominant cultural orientation that exercise the most influence on the 'concepts, values, and skills' that schools transmit....Education, in contrast to schooling, is our means of providing for the intergenerational transmission of values, beliefs, traditions, customs, rituals and sensibilities along with the the knowledge of why these things must be sustained. Through education we learn how to determine what is in our interests, distinguish our interests from those of others, and recognize when our interests are consistent and inconsistent with those of others. Education prepares us to accept the staff of cultural leadership from the generation that preceded ours, build upon our inheritance and make ready the generation that will follow us. Education transmits knowledge all things that give our particular cultural orientation its uniqueness. Every cultural group must provide for this transmission process or it will cease to exist."
 

Citation:  Shujaa, Mwalimu, J. Too much schooling, too little education: a paradox of black life in white societies. Africa World Press, 1994.

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