Monique Burton, Trenton
I called the Princeton schools and had a nice little chat with the superintendent, who was very polite, earlier today and pretty much vented my frustrations with the how the education system is as well as the complete disregard of African history from K-12 curriculum. I didn’t hold back on anything.
At first he said African-American history and I had to cut him short and reiterate: African history, as in before slavery in particular. He told me that they’re in the process of re-evaluating and redoing their entire social studies curriculum for the entire school system because they realize that they’ve made some serious mistakes and also because other black students have also vented their frustrations, as well.
I told him, “Do you have any idea the effect on the psyche of a black child learning so much history about their fellow classmates and only slavery (the bad) when it came to their own history?“ It makes that child feel almost less than not good enough, and very uncomfortable in the classroom.
And I also stated how offensive it is to have assignments about your family history for a black child because we cannot trace our history past slavery. I asked why aren’t the schools teaching about the Moors, aka Africans dominating Europe from 711-1485 and how they built Europe’s first university, The University of Salamanca, which was a copy of Timbuktu in Mali and The University of Djenne in Ghana (before it burned down), the black kings, black popes, black saints, how they brought in culture, sanitation, astronomy, medicine, alchemy, science, masonry. Where do you think we get Freemasonry from?
They don’t want to talk about how when Columbus arrived in the Caribbean the natives told him they encountered people of black skin trading gold-tipped spears and they came from the south, southeast which is obviously the African continent or the fact that he had to go to Africa to get the maps of the new world. And this is in Columbus’ diary!
Or about Mansa Musa giving out so much gold on his pilgrimage to Mecca in the 14th century that it literally toppled the Egyptian economy and it took about five years for them to recover it. The list goes on extensively. Most aren’t aware but all of the medical texts in Europe were written in Arabic up until the 18th century.
I explained that the school system plays a significant role in the narrative of history and what’s even more disturbing is if you ask any child what they know about the history of Africa, nine of ten will say slavery and that’s it, and I’ve asked many black kids this, too.
And they need to stop eliminating Egypt from African culture because it is African because the Nile River runs south to north meaning it came from the belly of Africa up to Egypt. This has got to change.
He told me to send some books and topics to him and I already have a long list of books and topics that they seriously need to incorporate into their education and not follow what Texas wants since most of American school books are based from Texas (go figure).
The narrative of real history needs to be set in motion now, otherwise we’ll continue to be more ignorant and the rest of the world knows this. So we need to be proactive with the education in this country.
Monique Burton
Trenton
