Critic Claims Required Black History Course Panders to Reparations Crowd
by Jim Brown
June 23, 2005
(AgapePress) - A leading education reform advocate is decrying a move by the Philadelphia public school system to require all high school students in the district to take a year-long course in African and African-American history before graduating.Dr. Chester Finn, president of the Fordham Foundation and a former Assistant Education Secretary during the Reagan administration, disagrees with the implementation of the black history course requirement. He believes the Philadelphia School System's chief, Paul Vallas, is pandering to the city's liberal mayor, John Street, and various community activists who favor slavery reparations.
While 65 percent of the Philadelphia School District's students are African American, the remaining 35 percent are an array of Asian, Hispanic, European and Native American children. The compulsory class, which Finn describes as "a pity," joins World History and U.S. History as the only required history courses for the district's high school kids.
Dr. Finn feels the mandatory black history course sets a terrible precedent. "If you're a recent immigrant, [for instance] a Khmer, a tribal immigrant from Cambodia or Laos, I think you'd find this quite mystifying," he says. "And if you thought about it very long, I think you'd be insulted or offended or feel discriminated against."
The former Department of Education official says students who belong to a non-African or non-African-American ethnic group, upon consideration of the requirement, are bound to resent the fact that "one group's history was being specially focused on and everybody else's was being left out."
Finn points out that the African portion of the required black history course was designed by radical Temple University professor Molefi Asante. This controversial instructor has been known to liken African history being taught by white professors and teachers to Nazis teaching Holocaust history.
The African and African-American history course requirement strikes Finn as having more to do with politically correct pandering to the slavery reparations crowd than it has to do with academics. "Blacks have complained for quite some time that U.S. history and world history as traditionally taught are negligent of black people's contributions," he says, "and so this is a form of compensating -- or overcompensating for that."
The Fordham Foundation president contends that "Philadelphia is one of these cities that's in the grip of what I think can be called a reparations mentality." But he sees no justification for requiring all high school students, regardless of their ethnicity, to take black history.
Finn says the African and African-American History course should be offered as an elective rather than a mandatory part of the Philadelphia schools' high school curriculum.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
