It matters not whether America is discussing illiteracy, poverty, sex, crime and violence or the ever-growing AIDS epidemic in minority neighborhoods, a consensus of experts at some point conclude that the solution to a myriad of problems bedeviling society is education. But, alas, when one starts seeking the necessary teaching, they sadly learn that the ill-prepared educators proliferating America’s public school systems need educating themselves.

This salient revelation suddenly occurred to us at African-American News&Issues while listening to talking heads on a local radio talk show discuss teaching our children how to solve mathematical equations that make the various academic tests (that have somehow become the standard determining our kids’ intelligence quotient) so difficult. B.J. (nee Ms. B. Johnson), a lovely and talented critical thinking expert, had just confounded the talk show hosts and most of the listening audience with an algebraic equation that she teaches seven grade students.
The well-educated hosts, whose profession certainly should require critical thinking (woebeit they discuss crucial issues with large audiences daily), laughed nervously as they sheepishly rationalized their ignorance. “I guess I’ve been out of school too long,” the talk show host finally explained her inability to solve an equation that B.J. routinely teaches pre-teens. As complex as the equation appeared to be, a cell phone caller, a math whiz himself, simplified it using the very same process that kids have been learning in public schools since the era of one room, one-teacher classrooms that adequately educated kids ranging in ages from five through fifteen.

Johnson would explain later that education has become a bogey man for society at-large, not to mention many young kids who simply aren’t capable of being educated beyond their ability to learn. The key words here are: ‘Beyond their ability to learn,” inasmuch as educators like Johnson are very reluctant to make unfounded generalizations about kids’ learning potential. However, “a child’s ability to learn” is at the root of the vexing problem that faces America’s corrupted public education system that President George Bush vows will “leave no child behind.”
Unfortunately Black children who aren’t privy to Dr. Suess’s books starts behind. During National Child Abuse Awareness Month (April 2001), Marian Wright Edelman, founder and CEO of Children’s Defense Fund, chided Bush for commandeering her organization’s motto. Conversely, she said the president would be more than welcome to use CDF’s slogan, “If he was making sure all of America’s children are provided an opportunity to receive the best education possible.” America the Beautiful aside, one has to be in abject denial to not realize that something is very amiss when the “greatest nation” in the history of humankind can’t properly educate its future generations.
Back to the basics notwithstanding, Helen Thomas, a Hearst Newspaper columnist, says that Bush is making a mistake trying to reform LBJ’s Head Start program and put emphasis on reading, rather than just expand it. Why? That’s a good question, and we’re glad you asked because the nation’s educators seem to be clueless. For sure, an answer is needed, insofar as over 14.7 million kids from kindergarten through grade eight are enrolling in public schools throughout the nation, as we speak. Pre-K are crucial years for educating the human animal.
Young minds basically must be able to visualize and ponder, before learning to read. In other words, educators unwittingly eliminated thinking, the most essential part of education, to conclude that reading, writing and arithmetic is the basics of teaching.

In essence, our children aren’t being educated but indoctrinated. Translation: The ability to think critically has been lost because it must evolve naturally and can’t be taught. 2002 America’s lesson plans no longer value simple games that made kids use their imaginations and creative thought processes.
Oops, lest we forget, made in American African’s intelligentsia will never accept a Black newspaper’s premises without validation from America’s academia. Therefore AAN&I researched Dr. Allan Bloom’s 1987 best selling “The Closing of the American Mind,” and “The Stages of Life,” that was written by Dr. Clifford Anderson, M.D. in 1995. According to those esteem psychologists and AAN&I: As the child matures, the mind must develop the ability actively to access information already available to the brain.
This information provides the mind with most of the material it will use to conceptualize the world. The converse is also true: One’s capacity to understand is limited by the information to which the mind has access.
Over the first five years of life, the mind slowly fills its need for input by developing those type-1 abilities that can access data conveyed to the brain through the body’s five (perceptual) senses. The mind first utilizes taste and smell, but these senses play a limited role in understanding the world. Hearing and touch are integrated next and the mind’s capacity to access what can be seen is developed last.

By age five or six, then, the child’s mind should in theory have developed the capacity to access freely—in balance—all that can be experienced through the perceptual senses.
In practice, however, the child rarely develops an uncompromised capacity to access all input; some compromise is generally the rule. But whether the ultimate configuration is correct or compromised, the balance is firmly established by age six and will remain unchanged through immaturity. From this point on, people who are compromised in the capacity to access visually transmitted information will be overly dependent of hearing and touch to understand their world.
Consequently, they will construct a somewhat simplistic and idealistic reality, in which such characteristics as trust, love, and caring play central, overvalued, and unrealistic roles. In the extreme, these people believe personal and universal problems can be solved completely by more loving, sharing, compassion and so on. The maturing person’s interim understanding of the world is based on incomplete information. Does that sound like anybody you know? Reparations aside, perhaps you fail to grasp the concept of today’s public school indoctrination that starts in Pre-K, as opposed to pre-integration education.
Even so, there is a preponderance of evidence that made in America African’s most educated have been indoctrinated to embrace the philosophy of peaceful co-existence with our oppressors and/or loving our enemies. Meanwhile, they scoff at militant Blacks’ lament: “No Justice! No Peace!”