I want to clear one thing up that some people here are talking about, and that is the government has no involvement in this issue what so ever. In fact, the Ontario government is against this idea all together and will not support it in anyway.
Now that I have cleared that up, I am highly against the idea of a "afrocentric school". I don't think this is the right way on going about, getting black kids more intersted in school. The fact is that kids don't go to school cause they don't enjoy learning, or aren't motivated enough to see the values of education. I don't want to be racial or steroptypical here, but the tendcy of black kids (the one's who don't value school) are to get involved in gangs and drugs. WIth them being able to "make money" or "steal", whats the point for them to go to school, they think they are set (please don't take this the wrong way, i know their are a lot of succesful people out there, it's what I have experienced and have seen).
Back to the "afrocentric" idea, they are trying to play it off as not being racial segregation because it will be open to anyone. But lets face it, no white, brown, purple, blue, yellow kid would want to go to a school like this. Only Blacks will want to go because of the "black history" they will teach. What I don't understand is what is exactly a "afrocentric curicullum". Sure they will teach black history and issues, but what else will be different from a normal school, math? geography? health? science? English? Last time I checked, those are universal subjects. In English are they going to teach how to talk like snoop dog?
Lastly, what about the other ethnic groups like the chinesse, East Indians, spanish ext. Why, can't they have thier own school to teach their kids about their history? I think what should be done is to possibly introduce maybe a black history course into the curiculum that students can take.
To end off my long rant haha, I think this biggest reason that this has become a large issue is the fact it is a publicly funded school, because there are such things as private schools that teach different curiculums such as afrocentric. So I do not support this new proposal and it is clear that the public doesn't and even not all of the TDSB supports the idea. We will ahve to wait and see what happends before sept. '09 when they plan to open this school.
