Education: The Highest Form Of StruggleUnity Consciousness #206

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The following is almost entirely quoted or paraphrased from Dr. John Henrik Clarke's lecture given sometime between 1989 to 1993 on Education: The Highest Form of Struggle.”

Our meaningful education for reality has come out of struggle. If you are educated in the midst of struggle, it holds much better.

I'm not saying struggle is essential to education; however, there's something special about struggle, in relationship to education, that gives you a concrete education you otherwise would not have. When you're educated in struggle, you're educated with a new reality.

Africans in the United States, have been miseducated and misnamed; therefore, we suffer the dilemma of assuming the methods of our former and current slave master can liberate us.

Either we liberate ourselves or we are not liberated at all.

Education and liberation are things you take with your own hands. If someone else hands it to you, that same someone else can snatch it back.

One of our dilemmas in regards to integration is that we are educated away from our traditions. We don't know how to measure ourselves based on our African traditional values. This is where we went wrong in regards to integration.

Basically there's nothing wrong with integration in itself except when Africans integrated into someone else's educational system, we accepted their educational values. Their educational values, devalue Africans.

In a rough hewn way, we are the most educated people in this country; however, we have not altered the education handed down to us fast enough to make education more relevant to us as an African people. We have been doing it, just not enough of us and not fast enough.

Pick up the pace of your self-education and the transformation of their education just as they took our African education and transformed it into their education!