K-12 Applied Physical Science Objectives Curriculum Outline: Africa & African Studies

Educational Curricula

Education requires a social and historical context, cultural purpose or function, philosophical orientation and human intention. Rooted in these criteria, curricula provide the tools teachers and learners use to fulfill the aims of learning.  Learned knowledge gives life to precise behavior. Precise behavior is applied to agriculture to feed people, develop medicines to cure people, and provide nutrition to strengthen people;manufacturing to create clothing, cars, trucks, planes, computers, books, dvds, printers, and other necessities of life; construction to create houses, buildings, roads, highways, bridges, hospitals, schools, universities, temples, stores, libraries, recreation centers, museums, and other centers of material culture; mining to dig up and extract precious minerals, gold, silver, iron, diamonds, oil, etc.  This is material culture, the essence of what a people creates in order to exist, grow, and develop.  Africans have yet to refocus on the technical and moral element of our education.  We have to learn again, as our ancestors did in ancient Kmt, how to do things and why.  Thus the questions: Education for what? Learning for what? Curriculum for what?  What type of person are you molding and for what purpose?  These are the central questions.


CRITIQUE OF EDUCATION RESEARCH

Without an accurate, organized, holistic summation of the history of the process, then the history of the ideas documenting the process (i.e., the logical summation or the theory), is groundless.  To reduce theory and method to a list of examples, criticisms, definitions, concepts, and analogies is to reject the principle of objectivity and resort to petty speculative, eclecticism, and subjectivity.  In the White controlled positivist social sciences and the reactionary aspect of the Afrocentric/African-center movement, the most widely used and fallacious method of research is to isolate and randomly tear out individual minor facts, dissect them independent of the social context that gave birth to them, string together some analogies, drop a few names of important people, then juggle this biased concoction with examples and “expert” references (and in some cases if the researcher claims Afrocentricity, sprinkle in some Swahili terms). 

This is not holistic scientific research. In fact, this is not research at all because isolated facts, selectively presented as variables and torn out of context are merely subjective constructs for juggling.  Reducing objective social processes to arbitrary patchworks of culturally, racially, class, and sex/gender biased variables and testing them in an abstracted imaginary context may be politically harmless enough, and culturally impotent enough to be published in mainstream ruling presses, but such publications are of no objectively scientific value, because each fact, each conceptualization, each variable, each analogy, each example grows out of some historically evolved concrete situation that must be summarized in its entirety if one is to bring to life---mentally reflect/reconstruct---the process in one’s mind that is taking place in reality. 

What Has Not Worked

Civilizations are not built from fruitless decades of debates with the paid intelligentsia of nations with histories of enslaving, segregating and brutalizing innocent people who happened to have black skin and be defenseless. Nor are civilizations rebuilt out of petty arguments about how many ancient Blacks nursed western and Arab civilizations into existence.  From Darfur to South Africa to South Bronx and South Central land is littered with a litany of lost lives, broken bones, broken promises---innocent people perpetually preyed upon by clever, cunning killers.  We've all lived long enough to know that we'd trade all we have for one real chance to stop our best and brightest from being sent to early graves.  Even further, this is not about merely infusing African agency into European/Arab curricula as to make African children more comfortable accepting the rest of the white supremacy curriculum.  Yes, infuse African agency, but also, develop independent African curricula.  As witnessed by the sad state of education/incarceration of working class African youth, today, infusion is not  enough.  Their curriculum is a cell-block.  Decorating it won't release intimately incarcerated minds.  Our children need more.  African Renaissance requires more.  History demands more.  And our wonderful ancestors, those who sacrificed everything---they deserve more.

Today, more than ever, the responsibility rests solely with the Africans most prepared and willing to end this miserable condition. The one with his foot on your neck is not going to do it.  They are not qualified: morally, mentally, or even psychologically.  We have to be smarter, tougher, and more honest with ourselves than in the past.  Africans need scientific and morally sound curricula and literature of rebirth. It must be accurate.  It must be independent.  It must be comprehensive, and it must be applied. The question of this epoch is not merely the need for a more relevant African literature, but what kind of literature is needed to answer the demands of this period---demands such as employment, technical and moral education, health care, housing, food, diet, exercise, clothing, transportation, recreation, self defense, security, technology, healthy relationships, ethics, land, child care and development, reparations, restitution, remorse/redemption, liberty/independence, self reliance, prosperity, longevity, how to engineer/how to manufacture life necessities, how to live life with purpose and meaning.  Real life questions require real life answers.

Less Preaching, More Applied Teaching/Apprenticeships