African focused school, more worms in cans?
Today, the Toronto district school board announced that in the upcoming year, a new school with a special curriculum will be in action. It is an African-focused school where officials claim would increase African teens to stay in school.
Personally, I think that’s completely bull shit. Sorry for the inappropriate words, but if I weren’t controlling myself, that’d be a handful of cursing words compressed into one. Separating by color or ethnic background is not going to help, we have seen that. Yes, it might solve some problem in the short term, maybe, just maybe the students would stay in school longer. However, that doesn’t advertise the traditional Canadian advertisement of ‘Multiculturalism’! In fact, this is so bad that it comes close to racial discrimination!
I have always believed in multiculturalism. I have this belief not because I was taught it exists by my elementary school teachers, It was because I have personally experienced it! In my high school, there was no formulas used to calculated how many student of a certain ethnic background must be in the same class, nor were there limitations to which ethnic background the course material must stay within. It was just school, knowledge was taught. It doesn’t matter if you were African, Chinese, Desi or White! We were classmate, schoolmates, learn to cope with each other and learn each other’s culture!
Of course in a math class, you would expect the teachers to teach math, and in a religion class, teaches religion. However, the learning of life has no such limits we call books, what might be rivals today might be best buddies tomorrow. Why must we bring in our ethnic stereotypes and our million tones of racial hate into the classroom and sour the future?
For the record, I have friends from all continent of this planet. And I also have friends in most famous religion. I’ve learn to adapt to their culture, and realized that it was my naiveness that stirred up some past problems with some on their parts.
These are my views, what’s yours?
January 31st, 2008 at 3:40 am
I found your site on technorati and read a few of your other posts. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed to my Google News Reader. Looking forward to reading more from you.
Matt Hanson
February 25th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
But what you left out of your narrative was that you yourself attended a Catholic high school. Why is it acceptable for Catholics to have their own school system and not blacks? Would the Catholic schools not be subject to the exact same criticisms you’ve raised?
And there were limitations to what was taught in that Catholic high school, before you attempt to deny it. The cirriculum reflected, wherever possible, Catholic values. The novels in English class, the interpretation of history, and most obviously, the presentation of religion in religion classes.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
Dissent,
I agree that the separation of the catholic education from the standard public education is not a wise idea. In fact, I believe that there should only be one school board, for the entire country. When I was a first year, I have noticed the difference in education strengths between me and my peers. Some of them are from the public system, some from the peel education system, some from Manitoba.
I remember clearly that my OAC teachers literally told us, “do not expect anything above a 90% unless you can teach me something”. Why did I have to go through such extreme forms of education to receive the mere credit while some punk who doesn’t even understand what an Essay is holds the same credit?
Of course that poor kid, in question above, ended up repeating 1st year twice, and then getting kicked out of University…. That’s why we should stop all of these separation crap and merge everything back together! We should have a system where every graduate would have the same amount of training or/and intelligence.
I wouldn’t want to repeat 1st year of any university courses, why was I given the chance to learn those skills while others of my age weren’t?