I appreciate and respect your comments, but Bill's remarks revolved primarily around *the family*, not around primary or secondary education.

You can put all of the money into elementary and secondary schools that you want, but if people don't have the kind of family values that place an emphasis on discipline and education, it won't do any good.

Bill knows that no matter what he does, he cannot raise peoples' kids for them--and the worst of the problems that he was addressing lie in the area of child rearing.

I don't think that Bill is saying that everyone needs to be like him (i.e. highly educated w/multiple graduate-level degrees). I just think he's saying that we are not going to move forward until people develop more of a sense of respect for education and learning *in general*.

Even in the examples you gave (plumbers, electricians, janitorial, construction etc.), some sort of regimented training program or vocational schooling is a prerequisite. If you don't respect authority enough to listen to your elders in the profession, how are you going to get the training necessary to do those jobs?


Encore-the following comments are not directed at you specifically--they are just general thoughts on my part:


This debate about Cosby's remarks ties in with the post in GD about the children of foreign-born blacks attending Harvard and other elite institutions in higher numbers than the children of native-born blacks. The children of these foreign-born parents are not any less black than we are--so why are they so much more succcessful than we are in gaining access to these institutions? I think that the reasons are cultural--and the difference can be seen in the strong emphasis on the value of education that is instilled in these children.

To be frank, I think that for starters, leaders from the native-born African-American community should consult with educators from the West Indies, as well as with educators and community leaders of the foreign-born blacks inside the U.S. They should start a dialogue about trying to institute some of the foreign blacks' emphasis on education amongst American blacks who are struggling with these issues. I understand that this would be a major, major undertaking in terms of implementation, but I think it would be a step in the right direction.

Many of the issues that American black people have concerning the value of education stem from the particular history of slavery and its aftermath in this country. I think that blacks who espouse these borderline-hostile views toward education fail to realize that we are virtually the *only* people in this country that have these kinds of pitched battles over the fundamental value of education, and that this has to do with the uniqueness of our historical experience.

The success of foreign-born blacks in American educational institutions proves that these hang-ups are simply not shared by all blacks.

One good way for us to move forward would be to try to learn from the example of these foreign-born blacks. Some of the American black leadership may be too proud to humble themselves to 'outsiders' in this way, but the fact is that we are going to have to get an infusion of new information from somewhere, because many of our people are headed nowhere under the current paradigm.