"All men are created equal" nonsense... education professionals in Toronto say we have to get back to the good ol' days of segregation.
-- TORONTO -- Admitting it is failing some students of colour, the Toronto public board could open a black-focused school as early as next fall. Two community meetings are planned in the next week to discuss the idea of an "African-centred alternative school" from junior kindergarten to Grade 8 that would have more black teachers, black mentors, more focus on students' heritage and more parent involvement. The board has been piloting several "Africentric" social studies units in Grades 6, 7 and 8 at a handful of schools in the northwest part of the city and has run an Africentric summer camp near Jane and Finch in recent summers.So how would the "black system" differ from the allegedly biased and apparently deficient "white system"?
At the summer camp last year, for example, students learned that Picasso based much of his work on masks from the Congo, that Africa had a university long before Europe – in Morocco – and students based a math grid on the patterns of lush "kente" cloth from Ghana's royalty.And teachers are saying there's precedent for setting up separate systems.
The Toronto board already has a grade school and high school for First Nations students and an alternative high school for gay and lesbian teens.Now, where is Dalton McSlippery on all this? Curiously, a couple of years ago, Dalton didn't seem too keen on black students being schooled in their own, well... monochromatic environment.
Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty opposed the notion of black-focused schools in 2005, after more than 500 parents and students called for such schools at a public forum on black achievement in Toronto. Noting he was "not comfortable with that concept," McGuinty said at the time: "I'm much more comfortable with the concept of bringing children from a variety of backgrounds together."Except, of course, your McSlipperyness... when it involves private Muslim, Jewish or Christian schools. Apparently though... there are any number of people out there, who think it's perfectly acceptable and perhaps even morally imperative to set up a "race based" taxpayer funded system. It seems, to quote George Orwell, "Some animals are more equal than others."
RELATED: So what exactly is Africentric wisdom?
Mbeki called Gevisser late one night in June to ask if he'd read a 2002 paper on AIDS, widely believed to have been written by Mbeki. Told that the author had, Mbeki nonetheless sent a driver around with an updated copy which had citations as recent as August 2006. The paper describes AIDS doctors as latter-day Josef Mengeles, the Nazi concentration camp doctor who performed cruel experiments, and black people who subscribe to the orthodox scientific AIDS approach as victims of a slave mentality. The paper claimed that Mbeki's spokesman Parks Mankahlana had been "vanquished by the antiretroviral drugs he was wrongly persuaded to consume," killed in 2002 by doctors who "remain free to feed others the same drugs." Among other things, the book says, Mbeki told Gevisser that he still questions that HIV causes AIDS; he believes that the main cause is not a virus but poverty and repeated exposure to sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis; and is convinced that the epidemic is "the latest racist weapon" being used against Africans.LAST WORD: Of course... it's just the racist system Because today, there's no such thing as a failed student.
"I believe institutions have to look at themselves first," Mr. Axworthy said. Several universities across the country have developed programs and outreach initiatives aimed at attracting aboriginal students and helping them succeed, but to date most have been one-time efforts, he said. That includes housing alternatives for students who often come to universities as single mothers or with extended families, as well as academic, cultural and financial support programs.However, Lorrie Goldstein begs to differ
The real problem is exposed not by the detractors of this idea, but by the fatalism of its supporters -- who argue since nothing else has worked, let's try this "Hail Mary" pass, which is a stupid way to make public policy. So is tokenism. The root crisis here is not that schools are failing too many black children, but that their families are failing them long before they ever get to school, given absentee fathers, women having multiple children with multiple partners and gangs becoming the only "family" a child raised in such a dysfunctional environment often knows.
