Anyone who knows me even a little knows I love cartoons. One of my favorites is The Boondocks, from the Cartoon Network and created by Aaron McGruder. A particularly powerful episode, “Return of the King,” imagines what would happen if Martin Luther King Jr. never died but was in a coma and woke up in the present-day United States.
The episode portrays a sorrowful civil-rights leader, discontent about U.S. policy, leadership, education and apathy. We don’t need him to come back to recognize the problems in our communities — we just need to pay attention.
For the first time, our generation is less literate than the previous generation. We are supposed to be getting better and brighter, but the truth is that most people are marginalized. Education is not just learning critical-thinking skills and certain skills for jobs. It’s also the best way to create a better economy and stop outsourcing.
Across the country, and especially in Ohio, public schools don’t get the money they deserve. Politicians have required more standardized tests but haven’t allotted the money to give kids a quality education and succeed on those tests.
Before anything gets fixed, the conversation about education has to come to the forefront locally, regionally and nationally. Geoffrey Canada, Harlem School Zone director and educational advocate, echoes many who say education is the civil-rights issue of our time. That notion is co-signed by Bob Moses, who worked with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 and went to Mississippi to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. If we begin with education reform, other problems will begin to solve themselves, or least become problems we can deal with. There would be fewer prisoners and more people contributing to the greatness that the United States should endeavor to ascertain.
In the “Boondocks” episode, King was appalled by our weak sense of civic engagement and saw us as a community of wayward citizens. Civic engagement isn’t going on Facebook to “like” a cause or “like” a statement — then doing nothing in the real world to help solve problems. Facebook is a social media phenomenon, but it isn’t a revolution. And we can’t afford to sit back and wait for teachers or policy-makers to take responsibility. This is our community, our state and our country.
What education does not need are people who participate in sedentary agitation. The future of education is intertwined with the fate of the nation. If I were to ask you what you were going to do to change the world, I hope you would say that you’re doing your part to change the way children are educated in this country.
