Jan 15, 2018
As Americans mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day on his birthday this year, the legendary civil rights leader's comments on U.S. education remain as relevant as ever.
American education has had few more prominent champions than Martin Luther King, Jr., whose legacy of inspiring and demanding radical equality Americans celebrate every January.
King had plenty to say about the importance of education and our schools’ shortcomings, calling out “the richest nation on Earth” for failing “to build sufficient schools, to compensate adequately its teachers, and to surround them with the prestige our work justifies.” King also warned about a society obsessed with teaching efficiency over critical thinking, saying “the most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.” Words that ring true more than 50 years later, at a time when U.S. public schools face tight budgets (like New York) and remain, in the words of a recent bipartisan U.S. Civil Rights Commission report, "profoundly unequal."
But King understood above all that problems in education stemmed from broader social and economic inequalities, issues that pro-equity reformers are tackling through community-based learning and bringing tutors to at-risk and low-income students.
banner image from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/01/15/what-martin-luther-king-jr-said-about-the-problem-with-so-called-educated-people/
Martin Luther King Jr. on the problem with ‘so-called educated people’ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/01/15/what-martin-luther-king-jr-said-about-the-problem-with-so-called-educated-people/
