It’s small — only six Grade 9 students so far instead of the 60 it was hoping for — but the province’s first public Africentric high school program has started at Winston Churchill Collegiate in Scarborough.
Delightful. An already balkanized school system gets even more segregated. These are perhaps the only people in Canada who could make the hard core Quebecois nationalists seem enlightened. Even the dead enders in la belle province wouldn't imagine denying their children a broad education because of their own ethnic bigotry. Nor could they come up with something so incredibly multicultural as this:
The only subjects that will not have an Africentric focus are gym and technology.
Ahem. If this report is correct then the math course would need to be taught in an "Africentric" manner. Welcome to the end of the multicultural line. Black students in a publicly funded Toronto High School will be taught "black math," as opposed to the "white math" they had previously been taught. Except math isn't a "white subject."
Grade 9 is typically when students are given a serious introduction to algebra, the gateway to the higher maths. The basics of algebra were developed over centuries by European, Arab, Persian and Indian mathematicians. Math is multicultural in the best sense of that word, different minds from different cultures working to expand human understanding. In math, as in science, you can transcend the particularities of background and focus on our common human desire to know. That noble dream is being cast aside in the pursuit of racial grievance mongering.
The problem you run into with algebra is the same one you run into with most branches of scientific knowledge. While you can create national and even ethnic histories, as well as corresponding literature and anthropology, you cannot create an ethnic or racial science. Even the Nazis weren't dumb enough not to use a formula or piece of scientific knowledge developed by Jews. They'd just claim it was "really" developed by an Aryan.
Science is concerned with objective knowledge about the natural world. To attempt to teach math and science based who discovered that knowledge, rather than what that knowledge is, would not be teaching. It would would not impart knowledge or understanding to the student. Instead it would be one more example to the child of how their group was different or better than everyone else. It would reduce the sciences to another branch of racial propaganda. The only lesson that the student would likely grasp is that black folk should stick together against everyone else. In a world coming together they are being told to stand apart.
The pretext for creating Apartheid High is that black students in Toronto are dropping out at a higher rate than whites. This is true only so far as you can juggle the numbers. There is the problem of lumping all black students together. There is some logic in doing this with Americans Blacks as a distinct subculture has developed in that country over the last four centuries. The vast majority of Canadian blacks, however, can trace their lineage in this country not much further back than the disco era. It is very unlikely that children from Barbados are facing the same challenges as those from Somalia or Haiti.
There are also the issues of family breakdown. It would be far more informative to know the percentage of drop-outs who come from what used to be called broken homes. My guess is that drop out rates correspond far more strongly with family breakdown than almost any other factor. Instead of looking for relevant personal factors, family and cultural background, the instinct of a large section of the educational establishment is to lump a diverse group of individuals under a single rubric because of their skin colour.
But remember, it's Right-wingers who are racists.
The reasoning, such as it is, behind the Africentric school rests on two assumptions: 1) The Toronto District School Board is so fundamentally racist that black students cannot receive a proper education in the general school population 2) Black students are simply not engaged by a "Eurocentric" curriculum. Both assumptions fall apart simply by looking around Toronto's schools. These are facts that no school board trustee or educrat can fail to know. It requires an impressive feat of multicultural themed evasion to ignore.
If the TDSB is so irredeemably bigoted, why is their bigotry so eccentric? How many white supremacists have you heard of that don't much like black students, but seem inordinately fond of Chinese, Korean, Thai, Filipino, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indian, Pakistani and Arabs. Each of those ethnic groups have very low drop rates, much lower than those of blacks and often lower than the overall Canadian population.
Then there is the argument that black students are not engaged by the curriculum. I can certainly understand why many curious and intelligent children would be bored by what is taught in the public school system. This is what often drives the best and brightest to misbehave. Given real challenges and responsible discipline many would thrive. Instead they are subjected to a system that often functions more as a make work program for mediocre humanities majors instead of a system education.
But let's accept their premises. Black students just don't like studying the supposedly Eurocentric curriculum. Why? The Chinese in China have no problem with studying not just "western" science but also western history and literature. English is the language of instruction in most of India's top universities. If people of other societies, many of them older than Western Civilization, find western ideas worthy of study and even fascination, why should Canadian students not be engaged? Is the problem that black students don't find the material interesting? Or is it that white neo-bigots don't think black Canadians can hack Shakespeare and Newton?
Welcome to the worst of Trudeaupian Canada. Racism at taxpayers expense.
Why not racist math when we already have Lysenkoism in science. Green narratives have replaced objective science. Hypotheses alone are justification enough for statist action. We have sexist and racial ministerial portfolios. The whole notion of objective reality is so "white male" in perspective. Come on Richard, get with the program!
Posted by: John Chittck | Thursday, September 27, 2012 at 01:41 AM