Blackberries and Black Students: A Cultural Profile of New York City Schools - Paperback

by Clifton Arthur Luke (Author)

The New York City public school system is currently experiencing the debilitating, convulsive fits of an existential crisis, a crisis exacerbated by its physical enormity, impersonality and utilitarian orientation. Blackberries and Black Students represents a rather impressionistic account of this crisis as it is objectified in many predominantly black schools in New York City. Personifying this crisis is an emaciated centralized bureaucracy of politicians-cum-educators; a cadre of abysmally inept, inexperienced administrators with little or no pedagogical experience; demoralized teachers who often lament their premature loss of intellectual idealism; uncooperative parents whose socializing efforts are at best perfunctory and indulgent; and a population of maladapted students whose worldview is shaped by an afrocentrist (multiculturalist) orientation that routinely romanticizes and exculpates much of their rebelliousness and recusant, anti-intellectual behavior.

Author Biography

Clifton Arthur Luke studied physical anthropology at Columbia University. He has taught biological sciences at Marcy College, College of New Rochelle and Fordham. In addition, for twenty-five years, he has taught science and mathematics in the New York City public schools. He currently lives in Downtown Clarksville, Tennessee.