AFRICAN-CENTERED EDUCATION
The Granville T. Woods Learning Exchange Defines African-Centered Education as the following:
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African-Centered Education is the set of educational strategies used to incorporate aspects of the indigenous knowledge system of the African continent. and it's wide variety of cultures therein, into present systems of education.
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The Granville T. Woods learning exchange embraces an anthropologically-scientific approach to developing it's African-Centered Education strategies, which draws from reliable resources about African culture and history. African and Afro-Diasporan Culture is filled with scientific thought and reasoning. African-Centered Education should incorporate this into modern day practice.
People interested in African-centered education should be aware that there are different institutions that define themselves as African-centered, and many of these different institutions will have different definitions. Unfortunately, a few of these institutions use pseudoscientific methodologies that can cause a great deal of harm to young learners, and parents should beware of these institutions. Nonetheless, African-Centered education as a whole, is an invaluable resource to empowering young people in the African diaspora, and African centered educators have produced marvelous results of academic achievement. |
African-Centered Education offers the following advantages:
Elimination of ethnic bias: African-centered education corrects the academic misinformation about people of color, which were propogated during the years of colonialism and segregation. Some of these incorrect assertions include the following:
“Africans were a purely oral people and had no systems of writing before Europeans and Arabs.”
“Ancient Egypt was a non-African civilization started by the Phonecians.”
“Hippocrates was the Father of Medicine and started the world's first hospital.”
“Aristotle started the world's first University.”
“Calculus concepts began with Isaac Newton and William Liebnitz.”
All of these statements are false. There are various peer-reviewed, scholarly works that debunk all of these ethnocentric notions. Nonetheless continue to be passed off as fact in standard textbooks. African-centered education, when done correctly, allows children of the African diaspora to factually see themselves as a part of humanity's knowledge system.
Identifying aspects of indigenous knowledge within present day Black American culture: It is not enough for a child to know that their ancestors contributed to society. They must be able to see aspects of many years of those contributions in things that are currently surviving within their cultural paradigm. When this happens, a child is more likely to use his/her academic pursuits to build upon the knowledge system of his/her family, rather than reject it and “re-invent the wheel” when it is time to start a family or business of their own.
What Negroes have been taught does not bring their minds into harmony with life as they must face it. When a Negro works his way through college by polishing shoes he does not think of making a special study of the science underlying the production and distribution of leather and its products that he may some day figure in this sphere. The Negro boy sent to college by a mechanic seldom dreams of learning mechanical engineering to build upon the foundation his father has laid, that in years to come he may figure as a contractor or a consulting engineer. The Negro girl who goes to college hardly wants to return to her mother if she is a washerwoman, but this girl should come back with sufficient knowledge of physics and chemistry and business administration to use her mother's work for a modern steam laundry.
Dr. Carter G. Woodson in The Mis-Education of the Negro
African-Centered education opens students up to the fiscal opportunities of African-to-American trade relations. An inaccurate view of Africa discourages young people from perusing the business opportunities that are presented to them by the African continent.