African-American images of education in the United States.
Item
-
Title
-
African-American images of education in the United States.
-
Identifier
-
AAI9707166
-
identifier
-
9707166
-
Creator
-
Woods, Jerry N.
-
Contributor
-
Adviser: William Kornblum
-
Date
-
1996
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies | Sociology, Theory and Methods | Education, Sociology of | Black Studies
-
Abstract
-
The purpose of this research is (1) to examine twelve African American social scientists' images of education, especially how those images place them on different sides of critical issues facing educational institutions and the education of African American youths and (2) to explain their contrary perspectives by seeking the social determinants of those perspectives/the social roots of their ideas. The study's field of sociological inquiry is the sociology of knowledge. Its critical issues and their different sides are: (1) class versus race and (2) racial desegregation/integration versus racial segregation/separation/nationalism.;Available written data reveal that those social scientists who believed that class was more critical than race were born and/or reared in the North. Those who held the opposing view were born and/or reared in the South and attended predominantly African American colleges in the South as undergraduates. The different social environments of the North and South are interpreted as having influenced the scholars to develop contrary positions.;On the integration versus separation/nationalism issue, the study found that only age fully differentiated the two groups of scholars. The integrationists were older than the separatists/nationalists. A dominant ethos of integration among the older scholars and of nationalism among the younger ones is interpreted as having the primary influence on their development of different educational images.;The author argues that race is more critical than class. He contends that both integration and separation are less significant for African Americans' educational development and equality than their avoidance of discrimination by whites and establishment of unity among themselves.;Importantly, the author also contends that an adequate understanding of the study requires that it be placed in a broader context than one or the other of the social scientists' differing positions and the causes of their differences. That broader context, the author insists, must posit all the issues, not one or some, as critical ones and white supremacy/white racism as an historical and contemporary destructive problem in American society, a destructive force from which all the study's critical issues emanate and derive their educational/race relations significance.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
