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BY ALLISON FASHEK
afashek@nwitimes.com
219.662.5333 | Saturday, March 11, 2006 | (No comments posted.)
GARY | The current education system is a failure designed to hold back blacks and the poor and should be thrown out, Minister Louis Farrakhan told hundreds on Friday, the second day of the National Black Peoples Unity Convention.
"This is not an accident," said Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam. "Black people all over America and all over the world, there's something wrong with the way we have been trained in a white supremacist educational, religious, political, sociological environment. You have never been trained to succeed."
The message appeared to resonate strongly with the audience, who gave Farrakhan a standing ovation and crowded around him following his speech at Gary West Side High School.
Farrakhan urged people to have the courage not to perpetuate the lie that the system works for everyone, citing statistics that 30 percent of children who graduate are functional illiterates and more black children, particularly boys, are dropping out of high school.
"Stop telling your people that if you work hard, you will achieve," he said. "If you work hard, you will achieve if they open the doors for you to achieve. The door doesn't open for everyone."
Instead of trying to transform the system, Farrakhan called on people to develop a new education system to free themselves as well as Hispanics, Native Americans and the white poor. He did not go into specifics of how the new system might work.
Most of the audience did not stick around for a discussion of how to address problems in education held after Farrakhan spoke.
Panelists, including Gary Community School Corp. Superintendent Dr. Mary Steele and Nat LaCour, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, said they agreed with some of Farrakhan's statements.
But, they added, it would be up to convention participants to come up with ideas to change their communities' school systems.
"Unless we come together as a unit, we'll never make the kinds of changes we want to make," said Steele, who is a graduate of West Side High School.
While Farrakhan said the system can't be fixed, LaCour responded that educators can't just abandon public education.
LaCour recommended policies that would put disadvantaged kids into the system as early as age 3 to give them a better chance of succeeding. He also suggested allocating money for schools based on need rather than the number of students in a school.
"Our struggling students need to have more money spent," LaCour said. "It's called leveling the playing field."
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