Shouldn't schools teach students something they don't already know, or is that asking too much?
Do inner-city teenagers really need to be taught how to deface public and private property with narcissistic scrawls and scribbles? Do they need academic instruction before they can cue up loud, vulgar records for their rutting peers? Do they need to go to school to learn how to writhe on the ground like toxic cockroaches? Do they need adult models to show them how to scowl, flail their arms, and murmur in mono-tones? The principal and staff at El Puente Academy in Brooklyn, New York evidently think they do. That's why the school offers a course called Hip-Hop 101 for all the aspiring graffiti artists in their heavily vandalized district, for all the would-be deejays, budding break-dancers, and rising rapmasters.
El Puente is "the very embodiment of progressive education," says Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, "and Hip-Hop 101 is progressivism made flesh. El Puente calls its teachers 'facilitators,' considers the collaborative student group the foundation of learning, and organizes its curriculum around large, politically correct themes. Also quintessentially progressive," Mac Donald observes, "is the central role political activism plays in the school's mission. El Puente evaluates students on their commitment to 'social and economic justice.'"
Writing in the Summer issue of City Journal, Mac Donald describes Hip-Hop 101 as "a classic example of student-centered learning. Rather than imposing a fixed, traditional curriculum," she explains, "student-centered learning argues for letting students pursue their own intellectual interests." The demand for "relevance" that began in the 1960s led to courses that "reinforce the parochialism of inner-city kids rather than open their minds to broader intellectual worlds."
Mac Donald asserts that Hip-Hop 101 ignores the "glaring educational deficiencies" of the students at El Puente. "These students have a very tenuous command of basic skills," she observes. "Any school administrator not blinded by the folly of progressivism would put such pupils on a strict regimen of real language study, filling their ears with the best examples of English prose, as well as drilling them on basic math," Mac Donald counsels. "To spend any class time studying and writing rap lyrics, with their street slang and obscenities -- not to mention studying graffiti and deejaying -- is an unconscionable diversion from the students' real educational needs."
Conceding that "El Puente's teachers and administrators are clearly well-meaning," Mac Donald concludes, nevertheless, that "they could not have designed a course more likely to keep their students down than Hip-Hop 101. Meretricious and evanescent, hip-hop 'culture' is simply not something that schools should waste a single second on when facing children as ignorant of the wider world as El Puente's are," she chastises. "But cutting edge educators are sleepwalking through the apocalypse, seemingly indifferent to the educational meltdown we face." Puente may mean "bridge" in Spanish, but this bridge betrays its travelers by leading them right back to where they started from.
