Teach the Babies

The Nsoromma School in Atlanta, GA

by Tre B.

Another testament to the failure of the Black and white media and my own ignorance, I just recently discovered these two great Black-controlled institutions in Atlanta: The Nsoromma School and the Imhotep Center of Education.  They take an Afrikan-centered approach emphasizing Afrikan values “to develop the whole child – the mental, physical, social, and spiritual aspects – so the children can work towards creating a more humane existence not only for themselves but for the entire world.”  If you don’t know what an Afrikan-centered consciousness is, read this book.

Imhotep Center of Education (ICE) has built its program around the concept currently known as African-Centered” education. Our holistic approach is based upon the premise that children will only excel academically and intellectually when the curriculum, teaching methodology, and environment reflects the builders of yesterday and the ideas of the future. Our belief in universal knowledge provides each student with the skills to meet the challenges of tomorrow.

It is important for us to set the agenda for our own education for social, political, and economic reasons.  One of the reasons I’ve always been critical of many HBCUs is because, unlike the two schools mentioned above, most of them are just second-tier, under-funded white schools in Black face.  They were founded by and receive the majority of their funding from white elite and white corporations.  Their very survival depends upon them being acceptable to these constituents, so any education revolving around anything counter to the status quo and white ideologies is strictly forbidden or only slightly patronized to make it seems like the institution is not totally obsolete in the Black community.  They train good Negroes to assimilate into white corporate America rather than creating their own businesses or working for a Black business and controlling our own economic destiny (and making a lot more money than the crumbs we get now).

Just because a school has a majority Black population, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it serves Black interests (unless of course those interests are also aligned with the “good” liberal folk that support them).  This is why it is important to donate money to HBCUs even if you didn’t go to one, so we can eventually control the funding and thereby control the curriculum.  Controlling the education of our future generations is the quickest and most efficient way to freedom and equality.  Why?  Because it is infinitely more difficult to re-program brainwashed Negroes so that they don’t corrupt the youth than it is to keep the youth from being brainwashed in the first place by giving them a proper education and instilling a sense of ethnic and cultural pride/loyalty at an early age.  Trying to integrate and beg for crumbs and meagerly funded Af. Am. Studies departments at white schools is inefficient, ineffective, and just plain stupid, although well-intentioned.  True integration means integrating the curriculum, not just the students.  And true integration can only happen when both sides want it.  Until then, we can do better with our own.