The word education comes from the root word educe which means to bring out. True education means to bring out what is there. Of course, it is necessary to put information into the brain, but that's not education. As a child gets older and gains more experience the focus must turn to true education. That means the child is less dependant on the teacher to spoon feed information and has the tools to discover and manipulate, understand and create his/her own knowledge.

What is education for Black people? To be complete and accurate the answer to this question must reach beyond the classroom. We must understand what we are told and "http://overstand" what we are not told. It's wonderful to have great teachers who can make the curriculum interesting and relevant. Yet our ancestors taught themselves on pain of death at a time when it was illegal to teach us to read and write. As long as we make it someone else's responsibility to spoonfeed us knowledge from an attractive package we will only know what they want us to know and we will be helpless to chart our own destiny or even to hold on to our own dream.

All true knowledge begins wih Sankofa. Sankofa means looking back to where we came from in order to understand where we are and where we are going. As they say he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it. What aspects of history do we need to know in order to consider ourselves educated? An educated person has:

• Self-knowledge
• Community awareness
• Knowledge of the diaspora of his/her people
• Knowledge about the contributions his/her ancestors and contemporaries have made to the world