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African-Centered Education
African-centered education is the process by which the characteristics of African culture are developed and advanced along with the knowledge and skills needed to maintain and continue it. African-centered education contributes to the education of African Americans by providing for the development of their sense of history, pride, and collective belonging through a reinforcement of their culture. African-centered education is a process dependent upon human perception and interpretation; therefore, it can be facilitated only by people who are consciously engaged in African-centered personal transformation. Following the same thought, a curriculum cannot be African-centered independent of an educator's capacity to perceive and interpret it in an African-centered manner. Both complex and straightforward, African-centered education facilitates recognition of the continuity of African cultural history, commitment, personal transformation, and recognition of the future of African people. It facilitates preparation for African life, self-determination, a link between spirituality and liberation, a bond connecting family and nation, and an acknowledgment of cultural artifacts and their meanings.
Foundations of African-Centered Education
Several major assumptions underlie the principles of African-centered education. First, it acknowledges that African spirituality is an essential aspect of African American's uniqueness as a people and makes it an instrument of liberation. Second, it emphasizes the fundamental relationship between the strength of African American families and the strength of their communities and nations. Third, it ensures that the historical role and the function of the customs, traditions, rituals, and ceremonies that have protected and preserved African American culture are maintained and perpetuated. Fourth, it facilitates African American spiritual expression. Fifth, it ensures harmony in social relations between African Americans and others. Finally, it prepares African American youth to meet their responsibilities as adults.
African-Centeredness and the African Worldview
The philosophy of African-centered education is founded in two schools of thought—African-centeredness and miseducation. African-centeredness is the interpretation of reality from perspectives that are centered by and within the processes that maintain and perpetuate the life and culture of people of African descent. African-centered education is part of the same process of cultural restoration and promulgation that is inherent to African-centeredness. African-centered education is the outcome of the African world-view, a term coined by Senegalese anthropologist Cheikh Anta Diop.
Diop's thesis is that European and African cultures represent opposing worldviews. Instead of a universal hierarchy of cultures in which Western European culture represents the epitome, Diop suggested that African and European cultures developed within two obvious and divergent cradles of civilization. The environmental harshness of Europe gave rise to individualism, possessive-ness, and forms of social organization reflective of the scarcity of natural resources within the European environment. Conversely, the warmth and fertility of Africa and the absence of moral and material misery produced a sense of collectivism and benevolence among precolonial Africans. African worldview literature identifies the following attributes of precolonial Africans:
- An emphasis on the family as a source of personal identity and reference
- A far-reaching and abiding spirituality
- A respect for elders and ancestral figures
- A preference for communal and societal arrangements
- A live-and-let-live philosophy of coexistence and cooperation among individuals, communities, and cultures
- An optimistic and holistic disposition toward life
It is important to mention that African-centeredness differs from earlier worldview constructions such as negritude, Black nationalism, and early Pan Africanism. Although they all share an emphasis on the need for people of African descent to resist the Western cultural hegemony, African-centeredness sets its focus on the recovery and restoration of the African worldview as a means of locating and centering present conceptions of reality and analyses of phenomena.
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