Taki's Mag

First came that menstrually segregated “mosqueteria.” Then their Che Guevara lesson plan. Has the always entertaining Toronto District School Board outdone itself with its newly uncovered “Africentric Approach to Teaching Mathematics, Science, and Technology”?

Some of you are tsk-tsking, “You mean Afrocentric!” with an almost audible sniff.

Shows what you know.

Progressives delight in constantly and arbitrarily reengineering the English language. This rigged game of musical chairs ensures that we reactionary racist rubes always land on our rhetorical butts.

So when black Torontonians and their liberal enablers started clamoring for “Africentric” schools a few years back, the local paper was obliged to run a helpful sidebar explaining why the right word wasn’t “Afrocentric” anymore:

“[I]t’s African-centered education, and there is no “o” in the word Africa,” said Dr. Patrick Kakembo, director of the African Canadian Services in Nova Scotia. “Why should it be Afro? That’s a hair-do.”

Now you know.

Anyhow: What does an “Africentric” curriculum look like?

A PowerPoint presentation at the TDSB website offers a sample Africentric class project, circa 2008.

Children were assigned the following question: “Why is President-Elect Obama’s win important to science?”

Yes, Canadian children. (And this plan was presumably put together before Obama slashed NASA’s budget.)

But it gets better, if—imitating our leftist friends—we redefine “better” to mean something closer to “cringe-inducingly horrific.”

Because the next photo depicts two black children obediently printing out the following answer, presumably at their teacher’s prompting:

“I think it’s important to science because it shows that black people are just as smart as white people.”

Jezuz.

OK, I’m a bitch, so I’ll play along:

If being elected president means you’re “smart,” surely that proves George Bush is twice as smart as Obama, right?

No?

Man, this “African math” is too hard for my poor white brain!

Another slide shows the following text, again written in a child’s hand:

“I think Mr. James Watsons [sic] shouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize because this man was a racist.…This man said that black people don’t have the intelligences [sic] that white people do but at the end of the day who is are [sic] President? And what colour is he?

Again, Barack Obama isn’t “are” president here in Canada, but I guess in the TDSB’s eyes, he are—I mean, is—the universal, Nobel Prize-winning President of Black People International Incorporated, so whatever.

Now: James Watson—the co-parent of DNA and “perhaps the most distinguished living American scientist”—“has” more “intelligences” than every teacher working at the Toronto District School Board (possibly combined).

Yet he famously resigned from the lab he’d run for 40 years after “making politically (but not scientifically) incorrect statements about African IQs.”

Those vastly superior intellects at the TDSB—besides accidentally helping to make Watson’s point for him—aren’t “gloomy” about Africa at all. Their Africentric lesson plan also features the following “math problem”:

Imagine you are an expert Kente cloth weaver in Ghana. The people of your village have asked you to make a special cloth to send as a gift to President-Elect Obama for his inauguration….How can you accomplish this important task?

Frankly, if I was an expert Kente cloth weaver in Ghana, I’d be thinking, “Hey, how come Obama’s brother still lives in a hut? Hell, why do I still live in a hut?” (Although that presumes I was still equipped with my Western white-girl IQ, right? It’s all so confusing.)

To turn this scenario into a math problem or something like it, teachers instruct children to calculate the cost of making such a gift and to “describe the length [of the finished cloth] using standard and non-standard tools,” such as whatever the hell “a Susudua” is.

(Just a reminder: An American teacher was forced to resign after assigning math homework with slavery-themed problems. But this is different. Because reasons.)

I suppose we should feel a touch of relief that Toronto’s Africentric math problems aren’t phrased in Ebonics.

This flaky curriculum is ostensibly designed to appeal to the city’s “at-risk youth,” none of whom ever seem to be Jewish or Japanese, but all of whom—at least if our newspaper’s depressingly frequent murder reports are to be believed—are “aspiring rap artists.” (Notice that they’re never “aspiring brain surgeons.”)

Local liberals decry Toronto’s “gun culture,” but dozens of dead “aspiring rap artists” a year? Bug or feature?

If that sounds “racist,” then I plead guilty, with an explanation. I can’t help myself, you see. The Toronto District School Board says so.

Included in their “Package for Educators Grades 7-12” is an item called “Teaching about Human Rights 9/11 and Beyond,” where children are taught that white people can never experience racism. They can only ever be the racists.

It’s right there in black and white.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

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