Moving backwards in history

Toronto's first Africentric school opened on September 8, 2009. Everyone's celebrating about how the Black people can learn about their culture and history and so forth, hooray. The Blacks' history won't be ignored! Kudos!

Not really.

What we are currently doing is taking apart the work done by the people who fought for unsegregated schools in the 60s. People died in that reform, lost their careers, some even their families. Now we are passing a bill saying, "Let's open a Black school where students are Black and the staff are also Black so we can learn about Black culture and Black history."

I have nothing against learning different cultures; it provides a new set of perspectives in life, but to pass a bill and establish a school using taxpayer money? Most taxpayers aren't even Black, and what if we don't support Africentric schools because of some issues?

Some people believe that by performing "affirmative action", we are eliminating racism because racism is renowned for discriminating others and putting our race as superior over the others. However, I have never seen the point of affirmative action because it is only a different name for
racism. Supporters of affirmative action say that it just highlights the discriminated race without discriminating other races. That's fine, but in this case it's going to raise some issues, partly because it's intertwined in the legal system. We open the Africentric schools because we want to focus on Black history and its role in Canadian history, but what about other groups who were also involved in Canadian history, such as the Chinese (and the opium case), or the Natives. Should we also open an Aboriginal school for them to specifically learn their history?

The following issues will discuss about the role of Africentric schools in Education.

Africentric schools are only around the elementary level. They may learn about their Black history and culture, but what do they do after grade 8? Presently, high schools are not Africentric, nor do they cover much of Black history. When they graduate the post-elementary institutions will remove their focus away from Black history. To emphasize the importance of Black history in schools, implementing only Africentric elementary schools will not go far because there are no later institutions which can reinforce the importance of Black history, hence the effort and intentions of Africentric schools go to waste. Not only does the emphasis of Black history become lost in the later years, but the standards would most likely be different than "normal" elementary schools because the purpose of Africentric schools is to decrease the ridiculously high 40% drop out rate. How else do we lower the drop out rate other than lowering our standards so many more students are passing? Lying to ourselves and dumbing down the curriculum (similar to my post of "Dumbing it down for the dumb") will not work, and it will only produce non-functional citizens into our already not-so-productive society.

As a poor rebuttal from one of the Trustees who voted in favour of Africentric schools, Donna Harrow states that "No one ever said little white cihldren couldn't come to this school." This is a poor defense, to say the least, because the Africentric school has already gained a bad reputation in the bill. It's true that nobody is rejecting white children as students, but they would reject teachers who do not have enough "African" percentage in their ancestry, so they are prohibited to teach in an Africentric school.

As I have stated earlier in this post, should we also open schools for the Latino/Latina students who are also suffering a high drop out rate? And how about other groups who want to have their culture emphasized as well? Currently, there are Saturday school credit programs (meaning these courses count towards your high school credits) which do teach culture and history of a certain ethnic group, such as Chinese (both Cantonese and Mandarin), Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Urdu, Punjabi, Swahili, and many more languages. We don't need to open up a new school with a new curriculum to teach. If these Saturday school programs were more publicized in the school system and more known to teachers, then we don't need to spend non-Black taxpayer money building a Black school which their non-Black children will never go to.

Furthermore, even if we see drop out rates lower significantly because of these Africentric schools, Africentric schools will still keep their bad reputation because African-Canadians still remain as a minority, and we don't know what goes on in Africentric schools. We still don't clearly know the widely publicized private schools and their inner systems.

The solution is not to open up a new school, because we can avoid it. We can introduce the aforementioned Saturday school programs, or even change the history curriculum to include histories of racial groups involved: the Natives' view, the Blacks' view, the Chinese view, the Korean view, etc. Instead of always only teaching the "White" view of history, we can teach children about all the different views.

Moreover, we can have separate courses in high school for these, such as: "The European Perspective: 20th century Canada", "The Aboriginal Perspective: 20th century Canada", "The ... Perspective: 20th century Canada", and so forth. If that is even too much work, then just have a little brief history from each perspective entailed in the elementary school and high school history curriculum. Universities are already splitting the courses based on perspective, as I have put in an example in the above paragraph. We don't need an entirely new type of school. We
need a better curriculum.

I also have to agree with Courtney Betty, who is a lawyer for the mother of C.W. Jeffreys. She says that this is all a mirage: the education board hasn't really done anything, but by implementing Africentric schools, it will look like they have done something. What they have really done is made a short cut for kids who are part of that drop out rate so they can lower it and make Toronto look like a better place.

Once again, there is no clear-cut remedy, but if we want to help our children learn about their culture (if this is the real reason for Africentric schools), then have the parents teach them about their heritage, or send them to heritage classes and heritage school, which do exist in a multiculturally diverse setting such as Toronto. If the schools were opened to lower the 40% drop out rate among African-Canadians, then have remedial programs implemented in the school instead of opening a new school "for the dumb", harshly put.

Africentric schools can only provide short-term success. The education board should not only look for ways to carry them to the next election, but they should (and we should also) look for long-term solutions that can significantly lower the drop out rate, not by supplying an "alternative school". These children are not leftovers, but we are treating them like they are. The core of the problem is not what the material is, but how it is taught. We need to re-educate our teachers and our future teachers on effective and efficient teaching.

Next post: high school counselors receive poor ratings for helping students with college decisions.