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Sunday, January 17, 2016

Martin Luther King: The problem with ‘so-called educated people’ - The Washington Post

Martin Luther King: The problem with ‘so-called educated people’ - The Washington Post:

Martin Luther King: The problem with ‘so-called educated people’

In this July 3, 1964 photo, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson (l) shakes hands with civil rights leader Martin Luther KIng (c) after handing him a pen during the ceremonies for the signing of the civil rights bill at the White House. Martin Luther King was assassinated on 04 April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. (/AFP/Getty Images)

Here, as I have published before to mark the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., are some of his writings related to the purpose of education and the U.S. government’s efforts toward educating its citizens. You will see that King was prescient on a lot of things, including the dangers of education reform that fails to focus on the conditions in which children live.

Here’s an excerpt from “The Purpose of Education,” a piece he wrote in the February 1947 edition of the Morehouse College student newspaper, the Maroon Tiger:
…As I engage in the so-called “bull sessions” around and about the school, I too often find that most college men have a misconception of the purpose of education. Most of the “brethren” think that education should equip them with the proper instruments of exploitation so that they can forever trample over the masses. Still others think that education should furnish them with noble ends rather than means to an end.
It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life.
Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda.  At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.
The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think 
Martin Luther King: The problem with ‘so-called educated people’ - The Washington Post: