Knowledge Reigns Supreme: The Critical Pedagogy of Hip-Hop Artist KRS-ONE

by Priya Parmar

Knowledge Reigns The Critical Pedagogy of Hip-hop Artist KRS-ONE argues for the inclusionary practice of studying and interpreting postmodern texts in today’s school curriculum using a (Hip-hop) cultural studies and critical theory approach, thus creating a transformative curriculum.

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Jb · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good read and in many ways, prophetic when the lessons taught in school are dumbed down or skewed, students ethics, judgement & overall ability to become beneficial in advancing our culture certainly follows suit. Nothing can replace truth & nothing can enhance truth, sugar coating our history can only serve to distort facts, circumstances & conditions and reality get lost. Our natural hunger for knowledge although well fed goes malnourished, propaganda & culturally centrist views & opinions are no substitute for the actual truth. Truth consists only of verifiable facts & stats & it's up to the one on a quest for true learning to draw their own conclusions & form their own opinions. By intentionally leaving out any info, or by factual yet lopsided skewing of accounts of truth just throws the balance of the real truth off. By presenting facts with an unbalanced emphasis, picking and choosing what facts to leave in or take out of an historical account can only force a distorted perception of reality & perpetuates more ignorance as it's packaged as education. The best solution in my opinion, is for parents & guardians to teach their kids at a very young age, before embarking on their educational path, to question everything they are taught or told, that you can't take everything at face value, & to consider the source with an understanding that even though an educator may believe they are correct and have good intentions, that they may not have been taught to question things this way & how to ascertain that distinction. With this seek knowledge & verify truth, disregard bad data through this system of truth refinement, researching & fact checking. To log and identify the reliable sources of unbiased truth & share these with others for the benefit of the enlightenment of all. Learning how to learn is primary, especially now living in the information age, the value of the currency is accuracy as well as quality. After all, the time has made the accessibility of knowledge possible, but you have to mine for real truth among the filler of dogma, rhetoric & propaganda. Ignorance feeds and controls those who are not learning to learn properly. Where in the past ignorance was an unfortunate unavoidable obstacle for the unlucky, now it's either an agenda or a choice to ignore all knowledge because of the abundance of bad data. Either way, knowing how to suspend judgment doubt or belief until truth is deciphered becomes a critical skill and it is now it's becomes a necessary responsibility, if the goal is to be enlightenment & education. Socrates said that the only good is knowledge & the only bad is ignorance. In today's world, I believe combining knowledge with ignorant intent can be most dangerous and the ultimate result of venturing down this path will resolve all of human ignorance, as it wipes out all humanity.