Spoken word artist and poet Prince Ea (Richard Williams) has shifted his career over the last couple of years, choosing to focus more on filmmaking and spoken word pieces than traditional music and hip-hop recordings.
His latest piece of work features the artist putting the American school system on trial, questioning its current archaic methods:
“Are you proud of the things you’ve done?
Turning millions of people into robots
Do you find that fun?
Do realize how many kids relate to that fish?
Swimming upstream in class, never finding their gifts
Thinking they are stupid,
Believing they are useless?
The time has come, no more excuses,
I call school to the stand
And excuse him of killing creativity, individuality, and being intellectually abusive
He is an ancient institution that has outlived his usage.”
He goes into comparing other industries to the school system, looking at telephones and cars from 150+ years ago, showing that that while those have made incredible strides in their evolution, the classroom has not changed at all. Ea argues that while other nations are changing with the times, and truly challenging students, our system is living in the past, which is the reason for our recent decline in education ranking worldwide. He certainly has a point, but check it out for yourself below: