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If one million students drop out of school annually, should we question the intelligence of the students or the ignorance of the school system, including the curriculum that may be antiquated and irrelevant, totally boring to students bright enough to see through the hype and scam of American education. Perhaps we should reward those students intelligent enough to seek something better, e.g., selling dope to come up or prostitution since they may be in need of money, a subject the teacher cannot elaborate on because he/she is part of the working poor.

As a substitute teacher I barely had bus fare to work, but my junior high students had wads of money, so what could I teach them? Maybe they were correct when they threatened to throw eight chairs upside my head--there were eight students in class at the time. Yes, maybe I needed chairs upside my head for trying to teach them. I should have been learning some game from them, since I didn't have a dime in my pockets.

So we should ask is the glass half full or half empty as per who is correct, or who needs to be corrected, the students or the school system. I know a black mother who knew her son hated school from day one. He told his mom he loved music but she forced him into the school house at which he did nothing. And when she finally allowed him to pursue his bliss, music, she felt guilty for forcing him into a school system in which he was totally bored. Today he does music and sound for her theatre company.

We are persistent in our desire to force a dead, white supremacy curriculum on our students, whether white or black, so the brighter ones reject it outright, the average go along since they will do this throughout life.

The solution is a total radicalization of education, something that just ain't gonna happen because it would reveal the true nature of American education: to prepare students to be a cog in the wheel of capitalism and slavery, to join the consumer driven economy and become slaves for life, with religion an additional form of social control or, as the Communist say, an opiate of the people. We see the boys reject religion as well since they are clear the preacher is a pimp and they don't desire to be whores for church or the slave economy.

The children want to hustle, if only they were taught a concept, a process to achieve the product.

If only they had a vehicle that would not get them snared in the criminal justice system. I've long called for entrepreneurship and micro credit as a way for them to come up. Obviously, they can sell drugs and sell each other, but why not teach them how to be proper and legal. In the process they may discover they need to know how to write and count, although they do some of this with their illegal endeavors, trying to come up and not be victims of the blood suckers of the poor by remaining in the school of the dead, deaf, dumb and blind. Often the teacher is dumber than they are, since many teachers have no idea what trials and tribulations their students go through

to get to school. They don't know how many of them are homeless, come from drug addicted families, fathers and/or mothers incarcerated or dead from violence.

Teachers cannot understand why Johnny and Johnnymae come to school loaded or get loaded when they get there, trying to medicate themselves from the pain of life, yes, in the same manner the teacher does when she gets home, have a drink and smoke a joint!

Half the children come from foster homes. When I performed with the Last Poets at an Oakland high school, the Last Poets asked the principal to tell them about her students. She said most of her students come from foster homes. So isn't it insane to talk about parental involvement when there is no mother or father? Many students are homeless. My sister heard a group of boys outside her window saying they would go to school if they had an address!

In short, what do we really know about the one million drop outs--more than likely half of them are pushouts, pushed out so the district can maintain attendance rates to qualify for funds. The Oakland school district went into bankruptcy from students skipping school. When they tried to force students into summer school, seven thousand skipped summer school.

I see students as patients and teachers as doctors. If the patient is sick and not healing we blame the doctor, not the student. Maybe the teachers need to go into the streets to find out the true condition of their students.

The truth is that we have no black teachers. The state of Alabama recently recruited teachers from the Phillipines. I attended a State of California education conference with four thoussand teachers, maybe four hundred were black, the rest mainly white women, young and dumb, but with husbands able to have an income so they could afford to teach the natives the white supremacy agenda.

Dr. Julia Hare said the schools are simply holding cells for the prisons. Something is sadly wrong with the picture of a society that has more prisons than colleges and universities. This past weekend we briefly attended a conference of decolonizing the university at UC Berkeley. All the multiculturals were there, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, but only a handful of blacks and most of them were females. Yet the jails and prisons are full to the brim with young black men at a cost higher than the annual fees of attending UC Berkeley, Harvard, Yale or Stanford.

But a decolonization of the American educational system cannot occur except in tandem with the decolonization of America itself. Only then will those million students find their way back into the classrooms, for the curriculum will truly reflect their history, culture, present condition and future possibilities as conscious human beings, not wage slaves or cogs in the wheel of capitalism and slavery. Like their ancestors upon emancipation, the children will need to be whipped out of the classroom and made to go home because the desire to learn will be so great.

--Marvin X

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