In one of the best deflects of government waste I have ever seen, a principal clings to his job by keeping a near-vacant school open changing the curriculum:

The Halifax Regional School Board is considering closing St. Patrick’s-Alexandra, an inner- city school built for 800 students that only has about 100.

Principal Ken Fells said one solution may be to change the focus of the school for the mostly black students.

Principal Fells likes to refer to all of the other schools as “Eurocentric” even though we don’t go around calling them that. He then butchers the English language in pure bureaucratic fashion:

In an Afrocentric school, students and teachers don’t have to be black. The philosophy is to highlight the achievements of blacks and all cultures, and focus on helping the students gain awareness of who they are, Fells said.

Blacks and all cultures, eh? So there’s nothing really “Afrocentric” at all, then? Well, I’ll just go mind my own business.

There have been quite a few blacks who thought that this was indeed segregation when it was announced in Toronto. Classes start next September, and I am positive that the little ones will flock back to school once they know that they can finally learn about the ancient Kingdom of Ghana. Free at last!

I don’t recall my education being particularly “Eurocentric” in any meaningful sense. We learned about the Seven Years War, the War of 1812, the Boer War, the struggles of French and English Canada, and so on. Is that necessarily “Eurocentric” that the major players in the world for the past thousand years or so were European? Don’t many of the former African colonies have some European heritage as well? That was certainly not mentioned when our schools did talk about Africa; that was just talk of slavery and the evil white man, apparently totally unaided by their “brothers” back in Africa, was totally responsible.

My school took us to the Black Cultural Centre, had many talks by the local black community, and we learned about Martin Luther King. If these types of schools crop up, are the Afrocentrics going to allow a member of the European community come in and talk about how many white slaves came from the Balkans and discuss the sacrifice of Unionist soldiers in the US Civil War?

This is a chess move by a man positioning to keep his job being principal of about a sixth of the usual school size that most principals have to look after. You will never get this school closed, or it will be racism forevermore. He wants his face put on a giant bronze plaque declaring himself “founder” of this school.

Oh well. At least it gives me a place to launch my own new curriculum…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 12:34 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.