Education As a Cultural Problem
Let us do a mental experiment: There is an educational crisis in poor communities. It just so happens that there is also a racial and poverty intersection going on. So we all agree education is a problem, right? What if I told you, let us collect 1000 books and drive them into the poorest areas in Africa and the Caribbean as a solution. So all the slums and loxions out there. What do you think would happen? Would it fix the problem? What if we opened brand new state-of-the-art schools in these areas? Are you sure it would fix the problem?
Islamic school in South Africa, after a traditional school, where kids learn to read Arabic.
DONT TRUST THE GOVERNMENT
In our main article, we cover more details about the educational crisis; this is just an addendum to that in a shorter, more digestible format.
The question was asked of an educator in South Africa: What would happen if I drove into a township in KZN and flooded the poorest areas with free books?
I just needed to grab at least 5 independent opinions other than my own direct experience working with the African Holocaust society. This is something we have always done to avoid our own bias. The people being asked are unaware of anything I have done or what the AHS has experienced.
CULTURAL INCENTIVES
Even without discrimination, Whites by culture alone would dominate Africans in engineering
People trust their governments with their kids’ education. But the government’s objectives and your objectives are not the same. Just like during COVID-19. If the government fails, they might just blame the English language, and while distracting you with some new program about Traditional languages, they buy some time, only as in the case of Nigeria, to reject it all and go back to English as a language of instruction.
I asked a very simple question. Social media incentivizes our youth to do this stuff. The little girl shakes her hips and gets 3000 incentives to do more bottom shaking. Where would they go to get incentivized to become chemical engineers, coders, archaeologists, linguists, technology specialists, lawyers, architects, scientists, and African scholars? Where is the reward for publishing a paper on market economies in Africa, or how to build like the Egyptians? So, if the trend above continues for all of those in the photo above, what cultural force would incentivize them to dance less and read more?
Very simple question, and let me expand it a little. Jewish culture rewards children who can read, as do many Muslims. Where in our African culture is there an indigenous reward culture for technology and literacy? A few days ago, I asked a very simple question. Social media incentivizes our youth to do this stuff. The little girl shakes her hips and gets 3000 incentives to do more bottom shaking. The albino girl got 67,000 reasons to make more videos shaking harder every time. Where would they go to get incentivized to become chemical engineers, coders, archaeologists, linguists, technology specialists, lawyers, architects, scientists, and African scholars? Where is the reward for publishing a paper on market economies in Africa, or how to build like the Egyptians? We do have many incentives for how BLACK the Ancient Egyptians were.
QUESTIONS SEEKING ANSWERS
Very simple question, and let me expand it a little. Jewish culture rewards children who can read, as does many Muslims. Where in our African culture is there an indigenous reward culture for technology and literacy? I see a lot of incentives to be the next Whitney Houston or the next Tupac, but I am especially asking about where in our native culture stimulates the next Neil deGrasse Tyson or Du Bois, or Silas Adekunle.
So we do have examples of people who have made moves in the intellectual fields, but is this an outcrop of anything native to our current African cultures? Maybe I am getting my question wrong, so let us try again. Within Timbuktu, there was a culture, an African culture, that produced erudition. It did not fall out of the sky, and it was not “imported”. Icons of Islamic history, like Al-Jahiz (who was part African), came from a culture of intellectualism; they did not fall out of the sky; their culture created them. In the same way, the culture of the so-called Enlightenment created wave after wave of European intellectuals.
CONCLUSION
I return to our seminal work Culture Clash : Modernity and African Culture. Because I have never seen anyone put together work like that before. Most are masters of discussing contemporary issues, or masters of discussing how amazing African culture is. But what about asking the 21st-century questions and tying our culture to the development necessary for Africa to overcome being at the bottom of everyone else?
We have clearly identified our problem as a cultural problem. See Education.
Let us look at the incentives in White society towards deep study. I can show you 1000 like this for Japanese, Islamic, Korean, Russian, Chinese, etc. Everyone is stupid, but just not all the time.
CULTURE IS EVERYTHING
Abdel Kader Haidara in Timbuktu with ancient manuscripts from Mali, Niger, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Nigeria, September 2009. Haider was instrumental in saving the manuscripts during the militant Islamist takeover of Timbuktu in 2012.
The challenge of infrastructure can be fixed with better infrastructure; you can just throw money at it and build more schools and cleaner toilets. The challenge of pedagogy can be solved with new teaching methods focused on more hands-on teaching, more practical field trips, etc. But what about the issue of value for education in a culture that has no legacy of education, no incentives for erudition?
