I was initially very against this idea, but have softened my stance a bit as I've come to realize that indeed the media was playing this as a "segregation" story when it's really something quite different. Moreover, it's hard to argue with those numbers of black youth dropping-out. I think 'outside the box' thinking may be what's required here.
Jim Coyle's column in today's Star sort of matches where I'm coming from...
Building a base to give a voice
Jan 31, 2008 04:30 AM
Jim Coyle
In an ideal world, we'd never have to make decisions based on the hard reality that there's no such thing as an ideal world.
In an ideal world, the Rodney King maxim would hold and we'd all get along. There'd be no segregation, no inequity, no history of injustice and oppression throwing its legacy down the generations.
It hardly needs saying that, in principle, schools – or anything else – premised on race are a troubling proposition, the depth of that concern best illustrated by the divided opinion and misgivings in the black community itself.
But it's an idea – given the crisis at hand, the minimal cost and risk attached, and the lack of easier answers – whose time has come.
Too many black youths drop out of school. Too many languish in prisons. Too many are dying. Too many have lost trust – in adults, society, but worst of all themselves.
Too many are without hope or motivation, but most of all without a sense of pride and identity, a sense (beyond caricatures retailed by popular culture) of who they are, where they come from, what they can be.
The situation cannot stand. Something must be done to break the cycle. Accommodations must be made. Risks must be taken.
When the Toronto District School Board voted Tuesday to open an alternative Africentric school by 2009 to help fight a 40 per cent dropout rate among black teens, it took one.
Personally, I'm a reluctant convert. But it began to seem a bit precious – given the realities of life in this city, how wealth and opportunity are distributed, the dearth of black faces in legislatures, city councils and corporate boards – to wax righteous about the pitfalls of segregation or apartheid.
It got increasingly difficult – given schools based on religion, language, affluence – to argue that segregation doesn't already exist.
The fact remains that any group hoping to gain a voice, to build strength, needs a base. There's no better motivator than having a stake in the success of something on which your well-being depends.
Other than black churches, however, it's hard to see where the black base has been. But soon, proponents of black-focused schools will have one. And there's probably no better base than a school.
Schools are much more than classrooms. They can be the heart and anchor of neighbourhoods, the place where other people's kids become "our" kids, the path to self-discovery, self-confidence, identity and community pride.
There's probably no better discussion of the challenges of race and identity than that provided by Barack Obama in a memoir he wrote before entering politics.
As a community organizer in Chicago, he was told by a school principal how the children in the projects changed at about age 10 or 11.
"Their eyes stop laughing," she said. They still made the sound. "But if you look at their eyes, you can see they've shut off something inside."
Another teacher told him the start of any education was to give a child a sense of himself, his world, his culture, his community.
"That's what makes a child hungry to learn – the promise of being part of something, of mastering his environment."
If nothing else, a black-focused school can be that starting point and that promise; a symbol of possibility and a community's commitment to itself.
No one who's ever visited the Henry Ford Museum near Detroit and seen, then sat in, that bus where a black woman named Rosa Parks made history, can ever underestimate the power of a symbol.
Jim Coyle usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.