Africentrism

Kathy Shaidle has a bit of fun with the Africentric curriculum devised by the Toronto school board.

Shaidle helpfully explains why the proper word is now "Africentric" rather than "Afrocentric," or at least this is the proper usage for the time being. She then moves on to give us some glimpses into what an Africentric approach to math and science looks like in Toronto schools. She offers, for example, a sample Africentric class project, circa 2008.

Children were assigned the following question: “Why is President-Elect Obama’s win important to science?” Yes, Canadian children. (And this plan was presumably put together before Obama slashed NASA’s budget.)

But it gets better, if — imitating our leftist friends — we redefine “better” to mean something closer to “cringe-inducingly horrific.” Because the next photo depicts two black children obediently printing out the following answer, presumably at their teacher’s prompting:

“I think it’s important to science because it shows that black people are just as smart as white people.”

If being elected president means you’re “smart,” surely that proves George Bush is twice as smart as Obama, right?

No?

Man, this “African math” is too hard for my poor white brain!

Another slide shows the following text, again written in a child’s hand:

“I think Mr. James Watsons [sic] shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize because this man was a racist.…This man said that black people don’t have the intelligences [sic] that white people do but at the end of the day who is are [sic] President? And what colour is he?

Again, Barack Obama isn’t “are” president here in Canada, but I guess in the TDSB’s eyes, he are — I mean, is — the universal, Nobel Prize-winning President of Black People International Incorporated, so whatever.

This flaky curriculum is ostensibly designed to appeal to the city’s “at-risk youth,” none of whom ever seem to be Jewish or Japanese, but all of whom — at least if our newspaper’s depressingly frequent murder reports are to be believed — are “aspiring rap artists.” (Notice that they’re never “aspiring brain surgeons.”)

One sure-fire way to make certain that most black kids continue to aspire to be rap artists rather than brain surgeons is to convince them that the African perspective on math and science, whatever that may be, is just as worth learning as the European perspective. The great scientific advances of the last four centuries, dare I say it, received very little impetus from African contributors. Indeed, children of African descent might take a lesson from children of Asian descent. Asians are very successful in the math/sciences and they've achieved that success, not by insisting on teaching their young "Japacentric" math but by following the trail blazed by the great thinkers produced by Europe.

I hope that the assumption of the Toronto School Board isn't that that trail would just be too arduous for young black students to tread.