Let the brainwashing began again. Most American school children are indoctrinated with European thoughts ideas and values. A Eurocentric education is one in which Europe and western thought is the foundation, focus, the center upon which all others revolve. In essence, the history of the world is merely a study of Europeans in the world and their interactions with other peoples. This is what students in American schools are taught. They are taught that European and western thought is superior to all others and furthermore, the rest of mankind has done little to advance human civilization. This narrow thinking and fake scholarship has done an incredible amount of damage to African Americans, who are taught this in school houses everyday. African Americans are unable to see themselves in what they’re being taught and are often bored and uninterested in what is being taught. They see themselves as objects rather than subjects of history. African Americans are taught this, “You have done nothing. You are nothing. You will always be nothing.” This is often the beginning of a deadly cycle, dropping out of school, unemployment, crime, drugs, jail/death. Africans and African Americans have made many significant contributions to the world, and these contributions should not be marginalized, ignore or placed into the shortest month of the year.

Fortunately, many African American scholars within the last 15 years have begun to tear down the racist wall of Eurocentrism and build a curriculum based on Afrocentrism. Afrocentrism is viewing the world through African eyes for African Americans. It entails placing Africans at the center of what is being taught. This change of perspective provides a transforming new world for African Americans and white students alike. It allows African Americans, who have long been denied the opportunity to learn about themselves, to have a true understanding of where they came from, that they were not just slaves who were then freed. Of course this change of perspective and thinking is met with a considerable amount of criticism. One criticism is that Afrocentrism simply wants to replace Eurocentrism as the dominant doctrine of educating. I will go into greater detail about this later, but there are many differences between Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism. The fundamental problem of Eurocentrism is that it poses as a universal view of philosophy, psychology, education, anthropology and history, whereas in actuality it is simply one perspective amongst many in the world as the Afrocentrist believe. Eurocentric traditionalist are, as Dr. Molefe Kete Asante, one of the foremost scholars of Afrocentrism, states in his work The Afrocentric Idea, “captives of a peculiar arrogance, the arrogance of not knowing what it is that they do not know, yet they speak as if they know what all of us need to know. To know the African foundations of human societies would be to possess a built in check on such arrogance.” (Asante p.5) Afrocentrism is about placing oneself in the center of what is being taught. It is based on an ancient Egyptian philosophy of holism. Holism is a view in which one views the universe, all reality from a single principle, called the Nun. The Nun is both spiritual and physical from which flows the universe, gods, humans heavens and Earth. Furthermore this view claims that all reality is a unity and are thus connected to one another.