"it's like trying to teach a dog to be a cat"

Here, KRS-One comments on the structures that exist for African-American youth. If material and curriculum in schools are culturally irrelevant, how do they expect students to be engaged and learn? He recognizes the devaluing of non-white culture in school and declares to schools that if the schools help create a bad environment for a student, he himself becomes bad. He comments on the civil war among the black community. This is an important idea to note because one often sees the media framing an issue such that it appears that the entire black community has this certain opinion as a collective whole, when that is certainly not the case. He also frames the issue in such a way that possibly sees the classroom as a means of curing the lack of appreciation for black culture in wider society.

A Survival Curriculum for Inner-City Kids
By KRS-One
Published: Saturday, September 9, 1989

Young black New Yorkers are raised in a racially polarized society. The murder in Bensonhurst of Yusuf Hawkins is not an isolated incident. The number of racially motivated crimes has escalated since Howard Beach, as the city's mayoral candidates ought to know. And these crimes are only the most obvious form of racism.

Young black kids experience a more subtle form of racism when their heritage and culture are stripped from them early on in their schooling. While no single cause accounts for the problems of inner-city kids, much of what black youth is missing - self-esteem, creative opportunity, outlook, goals - can be traced to what we're not learning in schools.

If more creative effort and dedication is not put toward educating the large, vital and energetic populace that is this city's black youth, the city may soon be consumed by the symptoms of racism, and an already polarized New York may tear itself apart.

In the city's schools, Afro-American kids are taught white American history, while our own heritage is blatantly ignored. Everyone is supposed to learn about being (white) Americans. As I say in my song ''Why is that?'' It's like trying to teach a dog to be a cat.

I was homeless for seven years. My mother, a single parent, was overwhelmed with responsibility. Her uncertainty about the future created unbearable pressure at home. I ran away at the age of 13 to live an even more uncertain life, bouncing from park to subway to shelter. But at least I was in control.

The lessons they were teaching in school - Thomas Jefferson and the Civil War, etc. - left me empty. Aggravated at what I was expected to learn, I was even more aggravated that I wasn't even being taught what I desperately wanted to know.

Most of what I know of myself and my culture, the things I try to bring across in my songs, I picked up either in conversation with enlightened adults or through my own study. I took to the public libraries for shelter, but I came out with much more.

If my story has a happy ending, it is the exception. Most people refuse to understand that black inner-city youth, alienated by their schooling, are left with nothing else to grab onto.

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