Your History of Hip Hop class just got way more legit. A national organization dedicated to facilitating, fostering and preserving hip hop culture released the The Hip-Hop Education Guidebook: Volume One in time for the 2007 school year.
And now, a quote from Talib Kweli about the textbook:
Teachers have no choice but to learn how to use hip-hop in the classroom. It's the language of the children. They have to respect the culture of hip-hop.
As reported by XXL, the National Assessment of Educational Progress recently noted that Black and Latino students are continuing to fall behind in standardized test scores and this guidebook supposedly looks to help solve that problem. No idea on how exactly.
NYU professor David Kirkland seems to think it's pretty simple.
"You can learn just as much about language and literature form reading Tupac as you can from Shakespeare. The themes and conflicts present in Shakespeare are all present in hip-hop," Kirkland said.
First of all, who reads Tupac? Second, who wants to break it to Kirkland that old Bill Shakey used approximately 25,000 different words in his total contributions to literature? I'm guessing Tupac used about 25, but I get the point.
My only problem with this book is that it sounds like a sort of canonization of hip hop, which means that someone is inevitably going to get the shaft. I'm guessing the book focuses mainly on the early days of hip hop, when it was still CNN for black people, as opposed to its current incarnation as the Home Shopping Network for black people.
