This is my first post on The Needle in the Haystack. I’m really excited about this blog; so by way of quick introduction, you can call me Malcolm. This is now somewhat an old issue, and in many parts of North America, an unknown issue, but I think it is important to talk about nonetheless.
From the beginning, there have been many challenges to the Africentric high school that was to be established in Toronto at St. Clair Avenue West and Oakwood Avenue at Oakwood Collegiate (which has now been facing much protest from the community surrounding the proposed site).
In general the following arguments have been made: i) an Africentric high school should not be allowed, mainly because it takes away from the pluralistic experience of Canada. These people are concerned that those students going to the already-established Africentric primary school will continue to the proposed high school meaning they will never encounter students of other races or cultures, thus being unprepared for multicultural society. Another deterrence is that ii) the cost on what is supposedly an already strained budget for schools. This is irrelevant; a “strained budget” is a factor for any school and is certainly not a reason to completely halt the creation of such a school. It has even been argued that iii) we do not know if it is “effective”, and we should test the results of an Africentric primary school before creating a high school. However, why are the two comparable? Primary education is very different from high school education and positive or negative results in one do not entail the same for the other. It is also stated that a high school is more difficult to plan, which is again, a disputable claim. Primary school and high school planning are different but one is not necessarily more difficult to plan than the other. The author tries to strengthen this the argument by mentioning that Trustee James Pasternack, (an “authority”) did not want to add a high school at this point in time.
Most people’s largest concerns seem to be that of pluralism and the fear that such a school creates “segregation”. The author fears that Africentric education could lead to too much of one viewpoint - however the same can be argued for the public school system. In fact, supporters of this proposition feel that African-Americans are overlooked by the system and that many Black students do not learn about their own history and culture, and this disillusionment contributes to their high drop out rates. Additionally, while students of an Africentric school may be surrounded by their own type of people, it does not necessarily mean that they are going to be close-minded or unwilling to interact with others, in other areas of their life – for instance, in their occupations. If this is such an issue, surely parents that send their child to a French immersion school are at the same risk of having a child who only speaks and interacts with other French-speaking individuals. In addition, encouraging pluralism means allowing groups to pursue their own goals and interests instead of having just one idea of what pluralism is (i.e. every type of person exposed to every other type of person, all the time, which has also unfairly been applied to this school when the case is the same for many other schools).
Yet “segregation” already occurs but in a less formalized manner. The author's, and the public’s (incorrect) underlying assumption is that every other school has a mix of many different cultures; however it is not uncommon for certain areas to have predominantly white students, or Jewish students, for instance, or any other given main group meaning these students are not always mingling with diverse students in a school-setting either. If we are to address this issue, it is a deeper problem which is not just characteristic of an Africentric school. In fact, the school population is probably even reflective of the people who dominate certain neighbourhoods or parts of the city meaning beyond just a school setting, many people are not even living in highly pluralistic areas. Before deciding whether such a school should or should not be allowed, maybe this means Catholic schools, or any other type of religious school should not be allowed either – these students are only interacting with people that share the same religious ideologies of them and when we discuss pluralism it is not just in reference to ethnicity, but also religion.
Beyond just an ethnic divide, or a religious divide, what about an economic class divide? Poorer classes all seem to be concentrated in the same schools while upper-class students dominate their own (better-funded) schools. This is not pluralistic either and these are all forms of segregation. I’m not saying we should allow it or we should not, but an Africentric school is only one piece of the puzzle.
One more thing to consider is that if we are to grant that the education system needs to change in order to make all groups feel included (in this case, African-American youth) then such changes should really be implemented in every school, so that everybody can strive to learn about each other in every school, rather than just targeting issues to groups “that concern them.” I personally would want my child not to just learn about his own cultural issues, but those of his neighbours and (diverse) classmates; this way we can see how similar we really are rather than pushing us apart even further.
*Note: This started out as a response to http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/423994 initially. More current debate can be found in the following articles:
Signed,
Malcolm [Exorcise the Demons]
Malcolm [Exorcise the Demons]
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