African Centered Learning

When Afrocentric people complain about the education system in the western world, they will often say that it is not African centered. Outsiders have no idea what this means. What does African centered learning look like in real time and space? Beyond the obvious fact that African people should learn more about Africa, the current presentation is flawed. We now learn in fragments, but African people are wholistic by nature, so we absorb information in the whole more easily than we do in part.


Let us use wholism on the current economic depression. If we were learning in an African way we would study it in all of our classes. In English class we would study literature about the economically deprived. In Math class we would study economics and private vs. public industries. In Government class we would study the difference between plutocracy and democracy. In History class we would study what happened during the last depression. In Art class we would create work that reflects how we see our society in the midst of this depression. In Music class we would create music that reflects and sustains us during this depression. We would learn these things together until our understanding was complete.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road

Each generation has habits that annoy the generation that came before it. When I witness the attacks on young men wearing their pants low, I have to remind my peers about how our generation wore pants backward along with fat untied shoe laces. On the Road is a novel about a group of people in an ealier generation. Jack Kerouac takes us along on a journey with a bunch of slackers as they move from state to state, job to job, and partner to partner, leaving behind bastard children. If someone tries to make you feel guilty about your generation's ills by saying how it was in their day, tell them to read Kerouac's On the Road.

Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage

Stephen Crane wrote a book depicting war that still holds up, even though it was written over one hundred years ago. Crane shows how young boys can look at the soldier from home and see a hero to be imitated. He then puts his main character, a boy, in the center of the war by making him enlist. Crane's description of war is so clear and accurate. First of all, war kills people in groups. War leaves many more soldiers with loses. Loses of limbs, organs, and mental health. Everytime I hear a young person in the subway discuss enlisting into the military, I wonder if he has read Red Badge of Courage. 

Back To School

Children are returning to school in New York City. Parents are buying all kinds of equipment for their children. Teachers are buying for the student's whose parent do not care. Everyone is busy and billions of dollars are being spent. The question is, what is the pay off for all of the money and energy that is being spent? Public Schools in New York City are good at a few things. They keep young people relatively safe during the day. Schools keep teenagers relatively safe from each other by keeping them in a controlled environment during the day. Schools also feed children that are impoverished with free breakfast as well as lunch. Schools offer the basic language  skills to children between the ages of 6 and 8 years old. That is about all New York City public schools have to offer. If your child needs more than that, you will have to provide it yourself or find it elsewhere. This is one reason why we created the Mighty Pen Center. as far as the 2010 - 2011 school year is concerned, good luck, you will need it.

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon is a great novel for 2010. Toni Morrison uses her novel to connect the past, present, and future with the flow of a large stream. in a time when people treat life like it just appears out of thin air, Song of Solomon reminds us that we all have ancestors as well as traditions that affect who and how we are. Morrison's Song of Solomon gives us clues to the solutions of our current problems like why some communities are so violent. For the answers, which seem to escape our leaders, look at the decades or centuries that precede us in the here and now. Morrison also shows us that we cannot escape our past, no matter how hard we try.

New World Order

Most people think that a new world order run by secret societies is ominous. I do not belong to any of these societies, I like to share, but I do not see anything wrong with our best and brightest controlling society outside of the reach of the silly opinions of the masses. It is obvious that the old world order is dead. The pain that most of us are suffering comes from the fact that we are trying to live our lives in psycho-social vacuums. If our most illuminated people are not going to lay down different foundations, then who? Do you really want the leading politicians to guide us? Or perhaps you would be comfortable with our leading clergy. These people would not know scholarship if it bit them on their buttocks. Of course we could all decide for ourselves how we are going to live. But the average person is only capable of doing what they are told at this point in our empire's history. I love enlightenment, so I want the brightest of each community leading us into the new world order of the 21st century.

Why Black People Suffer

African people in America suffer almost every social ill there is to suffer. Most of the analysis on our suffering deals with the consequences of our sickness, but never gets to the reasons why we suffer. I will give a few reasons why African-American people suffer. The first problem that we have is that as a group we have embraced a hatred for intellectualism. Most African-American people frown on thinking as an exercise for personal improvement. We have become the only ethnic group that does not support its intellectuals. If you ask the average African-American to name 5 intellectuals, they will struggle, or name some popular people that are smart. Every smart person is not an intellectual. Intellectuals think about situations as well as concepts completely in order to provide understandings of these things to their group. This brings me to the second reason why African-American people suffer. We do not measure each other on a proper scale. We asses each other’s value based on the amount of physical things that we amass. We do not factor in any intangible characteristics of a person. We do not even factor in the quality of what a person produces. The third problem of the African-American is that we do not view time properly. We reject any proposition that does not provide instant gratification. African people have been on earth for millenniums. African people have been traveling to this territory now called the United States for centuries. Yet the modern African-American cannot seem to think beyond the date of the next pay check.