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Perhaps the most problematic development is the emergence in dozens of cities of "Afrocentric" curriculums. All of them legitimately seek to ) bolster black children's confidence in their ability to achieve and to debunk the patronizing notion that black American history and culture began with the Emancipation Proclamation. When pursued with intellectual discipline, the Afrocentric idea can be inspirational. Says Franklyn Jenifer, president of Howard University, in recalling his own education at that historically black school: "Every course I took was infused with some sense of our destiny or my personal destiny and the possibility of my achieving it."
But through zealotry or inadequate research, too many of these courses have expanded their claims far beyond the generally accepted list of black attainments. Among the most controversial assertions: that ancient Greece derived -- no, stole -- its culture from black Africa; that black Africans invented science and mathematics; that the Egypt of the pharaohs was a black culture; and that a racist white Establishment has systematically hidden these and other black achievements. The hazard of such courses is that they may instill less pride than resentment.
Ethnic material increasingly is taught to children of all races; conventional history increasingly is not. In education-minded Brookline, Mass., where 79% of high school graduates go on to college, parents have had to fight to restore a European-history course that was canceled as Eurocentric and elitist. Meanwhile, students have been enticed into fringe electives with such sales pitches as "Have you ever wondered what goes on in the mind of a voodoo doctor?"
Why are Western cultural and social values so out of favor in the classroom when so much of the rest of the world has moved, during the past couple of years, to embrace them? Roger Kimball, conservative author of Tenured Radicals, a book harshly critical of the trend, blames the coming of age of the academic generation shaped by the struggles of the '60s. Its members, he says, vowed back then to transform campuses into engines of ongoing social change; now they are in a position to impose their will. A much less conspiratorial interpretation is that American schools and colleges are dealing with a demographic change that will take another couple of decades to grip society as a whole -- the shift, because of higher birth and immigration rates among nonwhite and Hispanic people, from a majority-white to a truly multiracial society. These nonwhite and Hispanic students want a curriculum that gives them more dignity. So do women and gays -- and faculty from all those groups. Says the Rev. Clarence Glover Jr., who teaches a course about the sins of "the European-American male" at Southern Methodist University in Dallas: "People of color have always been a majority in the world and are now becoming a majority in America. The issue becomes, How do we begin to share power?"