Angry in the Great White North

From the Toronto Star:

When a University of Toronto sociology professor proposed separate, black-focused schools for African Canadian youth to a packed house at an education forum earlier this week, a storm of arguments quickly emerged, both for and against the idea.

The concept that George Dei was proposing was first put forward in 1991 by Ontario's Royal Commission on Learning, which urged school boards to set up separate black schools to improve the lower graduation rates among black students.

On Wednesday night, the room broke into hearty applause when Dei made his case at a town hall-style forum on black youth and education in downtown Toronto, but the debate since then has heated up on both sides.

Some quotes from George Dei:

Current practices in Canadian schools do not address satisfactorily the problem of students’ disengagement and dropping out. This problem may be alleviated by the development of an inclusive curriculum that promotes alternative, non-hegemonic ways of knowing and understanding our world. As an African-Canadian educator, I consider a non-hegemonic Afrocentric education (curriculum and pedagogy) as one means to address the educational needs of specifically (but not exclusively) Black/African-Canadian students. Following Asante (1991), I interpret “Afrocentricity” as the study of phenomena grounded in the perspectives and epistemological constructs of peoples of African descent.

"Asante" is Dr. Molefi Asante of Temple University, leading proponent of the Afrocentrism. The cornerstone of his particular version of Afrocentric history is that ancient Egypt (which he calls "Kemet") was black just as sub-Saharan Africa is black, is home to all the knowledge now attributed to the Greeks, and that the Greeks, and by extension all Western civilization, stole that knowledge from black Egypt. Thus "white" civilization is a fiction, and is indeed "black" civilization being run by interlopers.

Other Afrocentric theories diverge even further from the accepted historical record. Another proponent of Afrocentrism, Tony Martin of Wellesley College, teaches students that Jews dominated the Atlantic slave trade, in a book published by the Nation of Islam.

But Professor Dei's interest seems to be in education matters, and in particular, how black learning is different from white learning:

Among the principles I emphasize is the idea that experience is the contextual basis of knowledge. All knowledge, from this perspective, is based on observing and experiencing the social and natural worlds. Social learning, therefore, must be personalized if it is to develop the intuitive and analytical aspects of the human mind. African systems of thought presume that all knowledge is socially and collectively created through interactions among individuals, groups, and the natural world. Knowledge acquisition, too, is not attributed simply to individual talent or to the capacities of one’s own senses: it comes from individual, family, and communal interactions, as well as from the interaction with nature. Such a world-view can be contrasted with those that privilege the individual over the community, rights over responsibilities, and objective over subjective ways of knowing.

That last sentence is telling: "Such a world-view can be contrasted with those that privilege the individual over the community, rights over responsibilities, and objective over subjective ways of knowing."

First it is clear that this other world view is white.

Second, our civlization, built on stolen black Egyptian knowledge apparently, does give preference to the individual over the community, to rights over responsibilities, and most importantly from an education point of view, to objective knowledge over subjective knowlege. Perhaps we misinterpreted all that stolen philosophy. In any case, how does one grade subjective knowledge? How does one prepare a student to be an effective member of society (this society, of course) if he is taught that what he thinks is correct is more right then what is objectively concluded to be correct, in particular when those two are in conflict?

Third, what is it about the learning process for black students that requires all these special educational techniques? Is it something organic, a biological difference in the brain? How else could you explain the fact that these problems apparently persist generation after generation? From the rooftops, for years, the call has gone out that we are all equal, that skin colour is just a minor environmental adaptation, and that under the skin, there is no difference between us. Personally, I think the problem is not in the brain, but in the home, but more on that later.

According to Professor Dei, blacks have a "knowledge acquisition" mode that is different; it works communally instead of individualistically. Moreover, there is no right and wrong for "black knowledge":

Afrocentric knowledge bases an understanding of social reality on a holistic view of society. In other words, the social, political, economic, and religious structures of society are connected to one another—political affairs cannot be separated from economics, culture, religion, cosmology, family, and kinship. Futher, because the social and natural worlds are full of uncertainties, there is no certainty in any knowledge.

I wonder if this lack of certainty in the natural world applies to Afrocentric mathematics (also stolen by the Greeks as well, by the way).

But as always seems to be the case, there is an ulterior motive:

For the Afrocentric educator, an awareness of personal location, authority, experience, and history is the foundation of successful teaching practice. Rather than claiming authority of text, knowledge, or experience, a teacher can share power in the classroom, knowing when to step outside the role of “authority” to engage students collectively in the cause of social change.

Engage collectively for the cause? What social changes, specifically, are the graduates of this system going to be agitating for? Will they be allowed to pursue different social changes, even contradictory ones?

OK, let's put it on the table. Are we talking about black students being prepped to be footsoldiers in the ongoing war for more special rights? Will black students who are more conservative in their thinking be "re-educated"? If they resist, will they be thrown out of the "village"?

Don't be fooled. The agenda here is to de-emphasize the individual and try to recreate some sort of idealized African village that sounds more like a commune:

In Afrocentric teachings, education is organized around communitarian principles
and non-hierarchical structures. A holistic, integrated view of schooling and education is adopted in curricula development and classroom instructional practice. Students’ cultures, histories, and personal knowledge are at the centre of the learning process (Asante, 1992; Harris, 1992). Classroom instructional practices extol the virtues of community bonding, individual sharing, group mutuality, and the matching of individual rights with social responsibility. The use of students’ home language and dialect are effective pedagogical tools.

Home language and dialect? For a sixth generation Canadian, that would be...English? And the goals of all students is to learn...English?

In what world does Professor Dei expect these communally bonded social learners to operate in? He might not like it, but out here, outside of his university, it is an individualized race for the top. Some succeed, some fail. Those who fail get back up and re-join the race. If the education system does not prepare students for that reality, what is it good for?

More black students might graduate from his schools (where "student success is evaluated in social terms (e.g., performance of civic duty) as well as academic terms") and feel good about themselves, but unless they've been prepared for our individualistic capitalistic Eurocentric society, that good feeling will last about 10 minutes. That's the time it'll take for a graduate's first job interview to wrap up with a kind smile and this advice: "You're just not right for this company, son. In fact, for any private firm. Maybe you should try working in a university or become a government bureaucrat."

Still, there is the undeniable fact that black students are doing badly in our white education system because of the way it denies the communal reality of the black experience (or whatever):

A 1991 high-school survey by one Ontario board of education showed that African-Canadian youth were not achieving as well as other students in terms of credit accumulation. It found that 36% of Black students were “at risk” of dropping out because of failure to accumulate sufficient credits to graduate within six years. This compared with 26% for Whites and 18% for Asians.

Wait a second. Asians? I thought their cultures were even more communal. Ethnic and linguistic homogenity, Confucion philosophy, unquestioned loyalty to the emperor, the importance of the safety of the state over the the life of the individual (think kamikaze pilot). Then how is it that they are doing so much better in our white system than even whites?

Maybe this has nothing to do with race and communal group think and dialects and stolen civilizations. Maybe it has to do with how education is valued in the home over basketball, how books are more important than gangsta rap, and how individual success in the present is more important than dwelling on historical wrongs (real, like slavery, or imaginary, like Asante's theories) that occured decades and centuries and even millennia in the past.

But what do I know? I'm a product of the education system designed to uphold a cultural lie. Exactly what you would expect from one of the ice-people.