Rap Music as Education an Insult to Minority Youth, Says Columnist
by Jim Brown and Jody Brown
June 4, 2004
(AgapePress) - A growing number of public school teachers across the U.S. are using rap music to teach history and English -- but that's not sitting well with one conservative columnist.AgapePress reported last month that the Worcester, Massachusetts, school system is putting a book of poetry by murdered rap star Tupac Shakur on its list of books to be read this summer. It is just one of many schools from coast to coast that are replacing William Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot with profane rap groups like "Run-DMC" and "Geto Boys."
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Columnist Michelle Malkin |
Author and syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin says such an approach is essentially a slap in the fact to young learners. "In a way, I think, this sends an implicitly racist message itself, because it says that students who come from certain backgrounds -- urban, poor, black, minority -- are not capable of understanding literature that reaches outside of their experience," she says. "That is the opposite of how education used to work."Malkin says when she was in school not too long ago, teachers challenged students to raise their standards and introduced them to the sonnets of Shakespeare and the poems of Emily Dickinson. In contrast, the conservative pundit says young people receive no lasting benefit from approach that incorporates rap music into the classroom in an attempt to make classical literature more "relevant" to minority students.
"Rather than uplifting students and forcing them to experience things other than what they already know, teachers are simply giving up ," the columnist says. "And there's this idea, this philosophy that somehow education should be about reflecting what they already are used to. I think it's a terrible message to send."
She encourages every parent to find out what is on their child's school reading list. Unfortunately, she says, they might be shocked.
Malkin Not Alone
At least one educator seems to agree with Malkin on the deleterious influence of rap music in educating young people.
UC-Berkeley's Dr. John McWhorter is an associate professor of linguistics who hails from black middle-class Philadelphia. He says that the rap music culture "retards black success by the reinforcement of hindering stereotypes and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly authentic response to a presumptively racist society."
McWhorter is author of Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, in which he argues that cultural traits are responsible for what he calls "depressing black scholarly performance." His book is critical of affirmative action, which he calls "an obsolete policy" that only tells blacks there "really is no reason to compete."
