A short while ago, the Tulane University political science professor and host of "Melissa Harris-Perry" show on MSNBC, Melissa Harris-Perry, made an ad enjoining that the education of kids should be based on a communal understanding of children rather than an individualistic one.
After she made the ad, many critics, especially those on the right, charged her with fascism and wanting to hand over children to the government. However, her ideas directly derived from African communitarian ethics where traditionally children in a community are understood not only to belong to their parents but to the community as a whole. This has, however, never meant handing over kids to the government or a centralized system. Writing about the education of children in an African traditional community, an influential African ethicist puts the matter thus: "Children do not belong to the parents in the Euro-American sense, but also to the whole clan community. The right to education must therefore involve this community as a whole and not limit itself to the parents alone" (Benezet Bujo 2005:434). Prof. Harris-Perry was therefore suggesting that there is an element of African ethic that can inform policy debates in the United States. The argument her ad raised was actually supposed to be about the merits of an element of African traditional ethic rather than an argument about communism. Those who made it about communism did not know what they were talking about.
After she made the ad, many critics, especially those on the right, charged her with fascism and wanting to hand over children to the government. However, her ideas directly derived from African communitarian ethics where traditionally children in a community are understood not only to belong to their parents but to the community as a whole. This has, however, never meant handing over kids to the government or a centralized system. Writing about the education of children in an African traditional community, an influential African ethicist puts the matter thus: "Children do not belong to the parents in the Euro-American sense, but also to the whole clan community. The right to education must therefore involve this community as a whole and not limit itself to the parents alone" (Benezet Bujo 2005:434). Prof. Harris-Perry was therefore suggesting that there is an element of African ethic that can inform policy debates in the United States. The argument her ad raised was actually supposed to be about the merits of an element of African traditional ethic rather than an argument about communism. Those who made it about communism did not know what they were talking about.
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