«The pedagogy of liberation in America functions about as well as Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed in Guinea-Bissau - that is to say, not much at all. Buffalo Public Schools and the School District of Philadelphia have annual budgets of more than $30.000 per child, significantly higher than the average educational expenditure of every nation on earth, including rich countries such as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Yet the results are dismal. ln Buffalo, only 18 percent of black students reach basic proficiency in English and 13 percent reach basic proficiency in math. ln Philadelphia, only 27 percent of black students reach basic proficiency in English and 11 percent reach basic proficiency in math. ln other words, the majority of these children enter the modem world functionally illiterate and innumerate.
They are condemned: not by "Western nuclear family dynamics" and "heteronormative thinking," but by the heartbreaking pathologies in their communities and the immense failures of the institutions that are supposed to serve them. The gap between rhetoric and reality is almost beyond comprehension. The ten- and eleven-year-olds at William D. Kelley march for the utopia of "black communism," but they are unable to read and write. School officials promise to transform society, but they can barely teach rudimentary skills. »
(To be continued)