Education
Education was understood to be a process of harnessing the inner potential, and thus it is imperative to equip the youth with an awareness of their identity. The term "miseducation" was coined by Dr. Carter G. Woodson to describe the process of systematically depriving African Americans of their knowledge of self. Dr. Woodson believed that miseducation was the root of the problems of the masses of the African American community and that if the masses of the African American community were given the correct knowledge and education from the beginning, they would not be in the situation that they find themselves in today. Dr. Woodson argues in his book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, that African Americans often valorize European culture to the detriment of their own culture.
The problem concerning formal education is seen by Afrocentrists to be that African students are taught to perceive the world through the eyes of another culture, and unconsciously learn to see themselves as an insignificant part of their world. An Afrocentric education does not necessarily wish to isolate Africans from a Eurocentric education system but wishes to assert the autonomy of Africans and encompass the cultural uniqueness of all learners.
A school based on African values, it is believed, would eliminate the patterns of rejection and alienation that engulf so many African American school children, especially males. The movement for African-centered education is based on the assumption that a school immersed in African traditions, rituals, values, and symbols will provide a learning environment that is more congruent with the lifestyles and values of African American families.
Read more about this topic: Afrocentric Education
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“We find that the child who does not yet have language at his command, the child under two and a half, will be able to cooperate with our education if we go easy on the “blocking” techniques, the outright prohibitions, the “no’s” and go heavy on “substitution” techniques, that is, the redirection or certain impulses and the offering of substitute satisfactions.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“There must be a profound recognition that parents are the first teachers and that education begins before formal schooling and is deeply rooted in the values, traditions, and norms of family and culture.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)