Recently, in the US education system, there have been a large percentage of African-American students dropping out of school. Continuing their education in their own homes as the prevalence of racism in American schools have been growing more and more.
In a recent study published by the National Home Education Research Institute, over 220,000 African-American children are now being homeschooled. In the study African-American, children make up the 10 percent of the total number of children being homeschooled. In comparison, the percentage of African-America students nationwide is 16 percent.
Most of the causes of African-American practicing homeschool is the fact that there is still racism present in the education system in the United States. For most White Americans, attending homeschool reasons are for their beliefs, religion and a disagreement to the educational system in the U.S. However, for African-American students, it is mostly being treated differently.
"Whenever there are mentions of African American homeschoolers, it's assumed that we homeschool for the same reasons as European-American homeschoolers, but this isn't really the case," Marie-Josee Cerol, known as Ama Mazama, discussed in her research paper. "Because of the unique circumstances of black people in this country, there is really a new story to be told."
Ama Mazama also claims that the educational system in the U.S. also robs black student of the opportunity to learn more about themselves due to the fact that most lessons are "euro-concentrated" world-history curriculum. "Typically, the curriculum begins African American history with slavery and ends it with the Civil Rights Movement," she said. "You have to listen to yourself simply being talked about as a descendent of slaves, which is not empowering. There is more to African history than that," Ama Mazam added.
If the system gives importance in teaching, the African-American culture in their curriculum it will build a momentum, which will give self-esteem and racial pride to African-American students.
