Textbook: Mba Mbulu's Introduction to White History: The History of White America. Click here for purchase information.

Click Here and read the extract from Mba Mbulu's Introduction to White History: The History of White Americafor this class. Think about and be able to respond to the following questions.

(1) What is education?
(2) What is the relationship between education and information?
(3) How did educating Europe's elite and miseducating Europe's masses work hand in hand?
(4) The author refers to a "widely disproportionate quality and use of information." What is meant by that?
(5) What role did education play in the development of America?
(6) What role did misinformation play in the development of America?
(7) In your opinion, are education and misinformation two of America's operational cornerstones?

The information that Europe's elites possessed and had access to was the type that is useful to long range planners and doers. As a result, Europe's elite groups, including the church, merchants and crown, were able to establish status quos and initiate processes that could keep those status quos strong and viable. On the other hand, the information that Europe's poor and working people possessed was the type that could only get them from one shortsighted day to the next. Europe's poor and working people were not able to establish a status quo that systematically acted in their interests, nor were they able to consistently create conditions that Europe's crowns, businesses and churches feared enough to accommodate. This widely disproportionate quality and use of information ensured that Europe's elites would always be dictating terms, and Europe's poor and working people would always be reacting and adjusting to the terms dictated by Europe's peers. This would have to change if the new land were to become something other than a replica of the old country.

But there were serious barriers to bringing about this change. To begin with, the individuals who made up Europe's masses were not impressed with each other's learning, which they all too often mistook for intelligence. For the most part, Europe's working people were convinced that Europe's peers were smarter and more intelligent than they were, and that they were unable to absorb, process and utilize data as efficiently as Europe's peers. This was not a conclusion that Europe's masses had haphazardly settled into, it was what Europe's elite had crammed into the minds of the poor and working people for centuries and centuries. Unfortunately, Europe's masses did not realize that.

Additionally, the views of those peons who resisted the ideological pomp and circumstance of the peers were, for various reasons, either never written or, if written, rarely published, promoted or publicly discussed on a grand scale. Thus, Europe's masses got very little opportunity, relatively speaking, to entertain ideas and trains of thought that were markedly contrary to those passed down to them by Europe's elites. By entertaining widely divergent thoughts, Europe's masses, over a period of time, could have created an independent body of ideological and functional realities. These realities, which gradually would have assumed an aura of legitimacy, could have impacted on Europe's masses when they needed to act in their own interests or protect themselves against the intrigues of Europe's peers. They could have, but they didn't because Europe's elites did all within their power to limit the range of thought of the masses.

Thirdly, because Europe's masses had been schooled to value information that sprung from among Europe's peers and served the interests of Europe's peers, the ideas of independent minded peons tended to meet resistance among the masses and be looked at suspiciously. As such, the ideas of independent minded peons were instinctively assumed to be less than legitimate. When an elitist spoke in the interest of elites, the masses assumed that he spoke in good faith, and the burden was on his detractors to disprove what he had said. In contrast, when a "peon" spoke in the interest of peons, the masses assumed that he spoke with malicious intent, and the burden was on him to prove that what he said was in good faith. When one understands the psychological implications of those assumptions, one realizes the huge political disadvantage Europe's masses passed on to the white individuals who were to settle the new land.
Information and misinformation can run hand in hand. Information that promotes the interests of a peer group becomes misinformation if it is deliberately passed on to "peons" in a context that encourages the peons to not act in their own interests. And, just as the knowledge and ignorance of a rich and powerful person or group is much more dangerous than that of the average citizen, knowledge passed on by institutions that are controlled by a rich and powerful group are exponentially more forceful than knowledge passed on by an independent individual. Europe's peers systematically used their institutions to rate and assign value to all classes of information and information givers, and succeeded in getting Europe's peons to accept their ratings and value assignments. As a consequence, Europe's peers were able to define what constitutes good learning, establish "educational" objectives for Europe's masses that were predicated on the needs of Europe's peers and manipulate Europe's masses into believing in and developing an allegiance to the mythology of the white elite. A white mass of people that believed in and had an allegiance to the white mythology is so important to understanding the development of the English colonies that it can not be overemphasized.