Pride

In looking through this list I am drawn to the word pride. Pride was so visible on the faces of the boys and their families in the film and I think that the Baraka School continued to build this pride in an important way. Pride is a crucial part of learning, it is created through community recognition and support and mostly through self-recognition. Those of us who have grown up in privileged, academically oriented communities, in our attempts to be politically correct and understanding, can take our cultural relativism so far that we don’t think that poor people want to take pride in intellect or academic achievement. The Boys of Baraka show that this is clearly not true, those boys and their families wanted to succeed in school and they took pride in their academic achievements.

As we’ve read about in Delpit and other sources, people of color often have to balance utilizing codes of power with the negativity that comes from “acting white.” Delpit emphasizes the importance of teaching codes of power as well as affirming cultural/racial identities. In addition to taking pride in academic achievement, students must also be encouraged and allowed to take pride in their cultural/racial identity. The Baraka School presented a rather unique and inspiring way to nurture both of these types of pride in the boys. Imagine if the school had been in the English countryside, isolated and rustic, with the same staff and program of study. Perhaps the boys could still have felt pride in academic achievements, but what message would that have sent to the boys about who you have to be or where you have to be from in order to be smart and successful. Society and media constantly present us with images of intellect that are white so to be able to connect academics to Africa was vital to producing the pride these boys had in themselves. We can see these ideas echoed throughout Delpit and Rethinking Early Childhood Education.