Most would assume that the proposed Africentric public school in Toronto is yet another opportunity for the day school community to assert its right to a more inclusive public system that would grant funding to faith-based schools.

The obvious argument is that if the Ontario public system can harbour aboriginal schools, gay-friendly settings, Catholic institutions and now Africentric classrooms, it should be open enough to house the religious/ethnic schools of all minority communities. That fact was true before the Africentric argument was made, but because there is a flaw in the Africentric idea, I would not want to base our struggle on this latest development.  

What we need is Gaia-centric schooling  – based on the so-called “Gaia hypothesis” that living and non-living parts of the earth are a complex, interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism – not Eurocentric, Africentric or Inuit-centric education.

Of course, any ethnic group can stress pride in its own cultural and spiritual heritage and will want to broaden the knowledge of its students in the literature, history, and values of its past, but the small, damaged world we all share demands a holistic vision, not a narrow view.  

To illustrate my point, consider the year 1492. Literate Europe was amazed at the potential of moveable-type printing, but it had actually been invented much earlier in the Orient. And most Europeans could not read in 1492. Who knows how important Jewish publishing houses were in the early days of European printing? Columbus “discovered” America, but it was already inhabited by our aboriginal population and was probably explored much earlier by northern Europeans.

For us Jews, 1492 was the dark year when we were expelled from one of our richest Diaspora cultures, our long sojourn on the Iberian peninsula. The expulsion was the equivalent of a 15th-century Holocaust, and it changed the face of both world Jewry and much of Europe and the Middle East.  

All of these 1492 facts are important, as are many others from all over the globe. The fact that I have given no Africentric information on 1492 betrays my personal ignorance and attests to the fact that my knowledge contains gaps that need filling.

Considering them together, however, is much more educative than separating out certain cultures and ranking them by some specious methodology. See Chapter 2 of Isaiah for a method of combining the particular with the universal.