Religion and Education

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Recommended: The education of African Americans

While variations in what the parents in this study want their children to become a common goal of a becoming a God conscious person is present. They share the same goal, the same dream for their children. Nevertheless they differ in their understandings of the best way to accomplish that goal. The negotiating of intricate and sometimes oppositional thoughts in education places AAM parents within the broader tradition of education for liberation in the African-American community. One example can be seen with a glimpse into the efforts of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) who were instrumental in freedom school movements. In their struggle to establish schools, they had some SNCC members completely dedicated to open- ended pedagogies while others disagreed and even a fraction that was indifferent (Rushing, 2008). Like the AAM s in this study, SNCC agreed on the big picture but did not agree on the best way to get there. Imposing this understanding perhaps the journey, to cultivating God conscious children, is not as important as the destination. It is this destination that link these two generations in spike of the context from which they emerge.

What I’ve chosen does not reflect what I want

Where are my girls (three daughters) going to go to school next year? This is a question I have asked myself every spring since they started school. I have twin 4th graders and a 2nd grader, so you can count my years of painstakingly revisiting this question. I have transferred my children between three different schools in the last 4 years.

For the first two years of schooling my twin daughters went to an African-American Muslim school. The school was 45minutes from my house and the tuition was outside of...

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...itutional Press.

Payne, C. M. & Strickland C. S. (2008). Teach Freedom: Education for liberation in the African-American tradition. New York. Teachers College Press.

Pedroni, T. C. (2007). Market movements: African-American involvement in school voucher reform. New York: Routledge.

Power, C. "The New Islam," Newsweek, March 16, 1998, p. 34.

Ray, B. D. (2009a, August 10). Research facts on homeschooling. Retrieved from http://www.nheri.org/Research-Facts-on-Homeschooling.html.

Saltman, K. (2007). Capitalizing on Disaster: Taking and Breaking Public Schools. Paragon.

Spring, J. (2010). American Education. McGraw Hill Publishers, New York NY.

The Islamic History Project Group (2006). A History of Muslim African-Americans. WDM publications.

Wells, A. S. (Ed.). (2002). Where charter school policy fails. New York: Teachers College Press.

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