Debates on Vocational Education of Black Students

Education and Capitalism: Struggles for Learning and Liberation, 2012

IAM-USA February , 2025

A Nation…Within a Nation! If one were to accumulate the income Black Americans earn and considered Black Americans as a separate nation, Black GNP would rank thirteenth worldwide, with a 2024 recorded spending power of ~$1.8 trillion. Nevertheless, the U.S.A. continues to grapple with a SWOT analysis, as it pertains to the transition from the sphere of school to the world of work. With a public education system which began in 1635 and formulated by a certain Committee of Ten in 1892, so directed by the NEA, as a fundamental strategy for success, this study delves into the good, the bad and the ugly of apprenticeships in Black America. Research relays that the contributing factors of culture, politics and economics are active and remain a harboring hindrance more than a holistic help to the promotion and progression of apprenticeships for all in America, yet overcome, by the ultimate apprentice of his time, Booker T. Washington.

In his book the Mis-education of the Negro, Carter G Woodson addresses the dynamics in the education or mis-education of the negro. He shares the intricacies in the pedagogy taught to the black man and cautions that for the black man to be able to elevate himself from the holds of underdevelopment into self-actualization, he must be able to think and use the knowledge he has gained to change his needs.

Carter G. Woodson has characterized the education-socialization process afforded to Africans in America as part and parcel of an institutional imperative for racial subordination. Woodson called this debilitating process mis-education and suggested that its effects permeated the social fabric of the African community. Over the last 30 years African-Centered scholars have echoed Woodson's contention by critiquing and offering alternatives to the conceptual and institutional framework of miseducation. In Intellectual Warfare Jacob H. Carruthers articulates the challenges and success of this effort. He demonstrates the inter-generational nature of this struggle and situates Woodson's ideas within the framework of the contemporary African-Centered paradigm. This paper endeavors at a synthesis of these two men's ideas and seeks to reflect an inter-generational dialogue regarding education-socialization and social change in the African community.

2021

Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education

2013

This work is dedicated to my aunt, Helen Arpin Lewis, and to my uncle, John T. Lewis who together with their daughters, Phyllis Lewis Spittler, and Susan Lewis Burns, never ceased to encourage me throughout my life. Although my aunt and uncle have left this earth, the memory of their unconditional love and support will forever guide me. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first teachers were my parents who instilled within me a love for learning and an appreciation for those on the other side of the desk. Because of their love for education, I was inspired to become one of those people who made a living with her back to a chalkboard. Thank you Mama and Daddy. I am also thankful for the many excellent teachers who worked for Vermilion Parish School Board. Some of them were my teachers; some of them were my colleagues. Margaret

2009

W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the brightest lights in African American history, wrote a sparkling critique of the American social and economic system originally planned as part of the Bronze Booklets series, edited and published by Alain Locke and the Associates in Negro Folk Education. The piece was never published and has, until now, been lost to the annals of adult education history. Using historical evidence, the authors examine Du Bois’s Basic American Negro Creed and the circumstances that led to its exclusion from the series. It is argued that the Creed was far too radical for the liberal minded Carnegie Corporation and its leaders who were only interested in accommodat-ing adult education for Blacks through the AAAE funded Bronze Booklets. The exclu-sion of the Creed represents an example of repressive tolerance by the AAAE.