Education and Black Studies

Education is the process of acquiring knowledge and developing the mind and character through formal and/or informal learning. Black Studies represents a radical departure in the formal educational process by bringing into the academy a perspective that is Afrocentric. In various explorations into the lives of African people on the continent and in the diaspora, the discipline of Black Studies has sought to provide students with in-depth discourses on African systems of knowledge. There are many varieties of African education, but most of them have the same basic characteristics. Based on the ideas from Black Studies, most scholars now agree that African education involves

• teaching the unity of humans and nature, an ecological idea
• teaching social responsibility, a social idea
• teaching the importance of character, an ethical idea
• teaching the importance of humility, a spiritual idea

In previous eras in Africa, rites-of-passage initiations were central to all education; vocational skill training was not a major part of the educational process. This meant that those with the ability to train the young used their talents to provide the proper measures for the young to experience and achieve the desired results. These rites constitute the pragmatic manifestation of the core values of a society. When a person was on the road to becoming a man or woman, the initiators would provide the necessary steps and procedures to bring the person to the goal. Then, as in most situations of this type, there would be a celebration. Modern education systems in the West tend to have similar markers, including the commencement exercises.

In the African traditions, preparations for such rites tended to start at a very early age. The community accepted the fact that the child would one day end the training period, and so they started preparing for it when the child was quite young. Testimony regarding the high level of integration that the educational process had with day-to-day life is seen in the fact that during infancy, lullabies were sung to the African child and served to communicate the whole history of the family to the child. When the child started to learn how to speak, the mother was careful to teach the child the correct manner of speaking, and later on in the child's development, she taught the child the correct manner of walking. The children heard questions such as “What is your father's name?” “What is your grandfather's name?” and “What is your great-grandfather's name?” All the questions were designed to connect the child to family history and cultural memory. Age-group sets were a key part of this system, and the character and memory of more mature children were developed through the use of fables, myths, and a complex process of training that resulted in the memorization and identification of hundreds of family livestock. In ancient African societies, there were no uneducated children.

By the time Ghana became independent in 1957, colonialism had almost completely destroyed the fabric of African culture and African people. From the early 1400s, the European system of education and the work of Christian missionaries had been implemented to instill in Africans a sense of inferiority about everything that was African. Everything in the education of African children was presented to substantiate the view that they were backward, primitive, and heathen. The primary purpose of this system of education was social control, to make Africans politically and economically valuable to and dependent on European societies. Over time, this system became in varying forms a worldwide educational system designed to support and maintain the continued dominance of the Western world over all others. It is this system that demanded the establishment of a more democratic movement in education.

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