Free Schools, the First Ethnic Studies Programs, and New Ways to Learn

Concluding Thoughts

This research has only reinforced for me the crucial importance of ethnic studies programs and courses for all students: for all of us to realize what students and faculty fought for, suffered, and endured so that people of color could attend college and come to know their own histories in a profound, multidimensional way that they themselves have shaped. And likewise, for students in the ethnic mainstream--white majority students--to de-center their own culture, to learn how communities other than their own tell their own stories and prioritize their own values and ways of being.

Lastly, one central goal of ethnic studies is for all people to be strong: as Professor Takaki says, for people to be whole in body, mind, and heart so that they come to want that same wholeness for everyone in America.

In the end, one way of grasping the impact of these new ethnic studies programs of the 1970s and of all the other new ways to learn is to think about how your own educational options today are the result of these student protestors' struggles to be heard. Even the fact that we have an innovative curriculum like SYRCE is due in part to the bottom-up struggle for educational freedom and self-determination.

 

This page has paths: