The recent uproar in United States politics about race stirred up by Jeremiah Wright has led to a flood of analysis. In the Washington Post this weekend there was an especially powerful piece by Gary MacDougal in which he lamented:
Imagine getting up each morning to go to work in a society that doesn’t want you, doesn’t respect you and seeks to hold you back. Your spiritual leader has told you this, after all. With powerful rhetoric, Wright has asserted, for instance, that white America sees black women as useful only for their bodies. If this is the message you got from your mentor, would you expect that you could succeed? Would you try very hard, if at all?
If you are a black youngster in an academically strong mainly white school, you may feel intimidation, especially if you have been listening to Wright and his ilk. If you are a black student in an all black inner city school, you can feel certain you are there because you are black and that you won’t be learning as much as if you had been born white and were attending the academically strong white school on the other side of town.
The day is now here that our example black kids can pull their mobile phones out of their pockets and catch up on the news from the BBC. Their white counterpart at Highland Park High School in Dallas, the most elite prep schools in Korea, rural villages in Kenya, and the finest and/or worst schools across the planet will all see exactly the same news.
Mobile learning is blind to race, and of course to gender or anything else that we humans employ to demean and elevate. All we have to do is optimize open educational resources for mobile to have true equality in knowledge delivery. The end to academic intimidation is already in our kids’ pockets. We can be quite sure that the mobile has no inkling of a society that doesn’t want you, doesn’t respect you and seeks to hold you back.
