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Sheila Simmons is the Notebook’s education writer.
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Asante on required course: ‘It’s about time’
Scholar says next step is training teachers and the public
by Sheila Simmons
Since the Philadelphia School Reform Commission passed a resolution mandating that all students take an African American history course, Molefi Kete Asante says his phone has been ringing off the hook.
While some calls have been from media outlets seeking interviews, others have been from school districts exploring the possibility of following in Philadelphia’s footsteps.
“There are many movements now . . . for this to happen,” says the noted Temple University professor, who has helped the District develop a framework for teaching African and African American history. “I think it’s about time. It’s a legitimate movement.”
Asante has long followed how the world views African and African American studies. He has penned literally scores of books on the topics and ushered some 125 doctoral students through Temple’s African American Studies department. The African Union, an association of African nations, invited him to give one of the keynote addresses at the Conference of Intellectuals of Africa and the Diaspora in 2004.
Asante prepared three course outlines for the District, and the District piloted a high school course in African history based on his outline last spring. Asante has also assisted the District’s professional development activities.
A six-week unit on Africa now opens the School District’s new high school African American history class.
On the Philadelphia decision mandating a course, Asante says, “It should be mandated by every school district – whether you’re in Iowa or Chicago.”
“You can’t really declare any competence about the American society without knowing about African American history,” Asante stresses. “You can be quite ill-equipped to deal with any relationship about this country without knowing about the population that was at the very base of creating the material and economic wealth of the country during the 250-year period of slavery.”
The District’s course opens on Africa as ancestral home to the world, and then leads students into discussion of resistance against slavery.
Asante’s own Africa-as-central-focus approach is referred to as “Afrocentricity,” and he says this centrality of African civilization and culture comes into play in all his work.
For those who say that requiring an African American history course is divisive, Asante chuckles in disbelief. “Why should it be divisive to teach about African people? That does not even register with me. You have 14 percent of the American population, a unique history of people ripped away from the continent of Africa, and brought here to work for 246 years. I mean it’s an incredible history. But we need to know about it.”
And for those who say that mandating African American history is about boosting African American students’ self-esteem, Asante responds, “I don’t write self-esteem courses.”
“Most research will tell you that most Black people don’t have a problem with self-esteem anyway,” he continues. “Most of the young (African American) children that I speak with, if you ask them how do they like themselves – how they walk, play, and act – they’re fine.”
He will consider the notion of African Americans’ suffering low cultural esteem “in the sense that Africa has been put down so much that Black people may not like being African or may not like Africa. But certainly, that’s not self-esteem.”
On where Philadelphia goes from here, now that the course is in place, Asante suggests training for teachers and for the public.
“I think the public needs to come to a series of public meetings where they learn about what goes on in the course, so they won’t have a mistaken notion that the course is somehow self-esteem training and that kind of thing,” he says.
Asante maintains that much rides on accurately teaching children about African American history. For him, it’s a matter of finally creating a school environment that “adequately prepares Black children to enter the world as sane human beings.”