Maths
Science
OuStory
Language Arts
The Arts
We Need You!
Our innovative educational and leadership
development classes, coures, projects
redefine Black education - teaching,
learning and evalution based on Afrikan
culture & psychology for us to achieve our
ancestor’s highest aspirations. We are
transforming ourselves into better
warriors, healers and builders to
accomplish the task.
Online - Live -
You can support from anywhere!
Education has been weaponized
against us. Let’s flip it into a
liberation force and path.
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Course Teachers
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Program Volunteers
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Classroom Supporters
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Teacher Apprentices
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“Plants Count” Tanzanian
Cohort Supporters
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“Family-Lore” Project
Publishers, Sponsors &
Supporters
Youth and Adult Education
Middle & High School
Parents & Grandparents
We need:
About Us
AYA Educational Institute offers
courses for adults and youth. Our
youth program is executed as an
online demonstration school for
Black middle & high school
students.
We innovate for success then
share what we’ve learned with
parents, other educational
communities and institutions
dedicated to uplifting our
students, their families, our
communities, and our people.
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Started in 1998
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83.3% of Grads earn full
ride scholarships!
Afrikan-Centered
Few of us grew up attending Afrikan-centered
schools. We attended European-centered schools
(public and private) dedicated to the preservation
of white domination over African people. Of
course, that stark presentation provokes Black
resistance, so they pretended to be agents of
empowerment - lifting us by teaching us math,
science, reading, character development,
literature, history, culture, and the like.
Our enhanced and intrinsic value of “Education as
“a way up” - we brought with us from Timbuktu,
Kemet, and The Kongo, from Monamatapa, and
the “Doghana,” from home - Afrika.
Our number systems and languages, sciences,
symbols, and our daily communications were
metaphorical and multilayered with different levels
of meaning. Education consisted of moving
through stages to divinity. For the Dogon, it started
with training just to be able to be aware (Giri So);
then upward to see the same thing from different
perspectives, “from the side” ( Bene So) then
progress to an even higher understanding of the
“word from behind” which gave cultural context
and meaning so that we could hear the “clear
word.” (So Dayi).
Once here - in this land of “trouble” - we also
shaped “education” in response to oppression
to be a vehicle and a path - a way out.
This runs so deep in us that many of us still
resonate with education as a way up and out
today. But education, as we know it, was hi-
jacked. For Europeans, it became a way in!
It was and is a major tool in their socialization
agenda and cultural war. David Walker and
Carter G. Woodson railed against this
hijacking calling it “miseducation.” Later
Mama Marimba Ani would name their
strategy the Rhetorical Ethic.
This wasn’t just a war on Afrikan peoples’
bodies, it was a war on the structure of the
family, values, traditions, identity, purpose,
and processes that produced the Afrikan
person and Afrikan people. Our enemies had
tried everything - divide and conquer,
captivity, brutal physical and mental abuse of
every kind to quell the pulsating Afrikan spirit
determined to be free of white domination,
determined to create and to recreate “home,”
to recreate Afrika - right here, to heal, to
return to keep the promises whispered on the
night air as we were taken in the belly of
those ships.
War
This Afrikan spirit manifested an undulating
union of “I” and “we” that allowed us to “make a
way out of no-way,” to time-travel, to redefine
death. This unity of seeming opposites boldly
contrasted the European way and proclaimed as
“juvenile” the:
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“I vs. we;” “Me vs. you;” and
“Man vs. God” dichotomies of European
socialization.
Europeans met to discuss how they could stop
this silent, yet powerful confrontation.
Baba Asa Hilliard tells us that they left one of
those meetings frustrated that no matter what,
no matter how far and how dim, Afrikan people
will go to the light. One of their phrases captures
their frustration and their agenda: “If only we
can cut out the light.”
By hijacking our value of education and
manipulating who would be hired and lauded
after “education,” they sought to used education
to do just that! All subjects were used to alienate
us from Afrikan family, community, identity,
culture, structures, and purpose.
It was and is war. The process is
resocialization - manufacturing surrender and
consent - captivity adorned in yet another set
of clothes.
Even in the face of this education cladded
cultural war, we survived and some excelled in
their systems. We were also wounded.
The problem is that we teach the way we were
taught - for the most part. Worse, we teach
the way the oppressor has instructed us to
teach. When we repeat - unchecked - the
oppressor’s curricula, methods, values,
agenda, we become caring, unwitting, hard-
working instruments of their oppression. We
also ignore the wounds we received and thus
normalize them. We shut out the Afrikan light
for our peers and our children.
If you’re still reading this, you may want to be a
part of the healing solution for yourself, our
students, and our people.
Welcome. We need you.
Healing Alienation
One of the key aspects of an African-
centered education is healing alienation.
The mis-education that we received worked
to alienate us from our history, our cultural
ways, lessons, and mission. It sought also
to alienate us from the very subjects we
were being taught. Of course, we were
“blamed” for not excelling.” Dr. Amos N.
Wilson provides the explanation:
“We are alienated to serve aliens.” -
To serve those not in or of our community
that orchestrate or collaborate and benefit
from our misery and our service - while
our community and our people decline.
Dr. Asa Hilliard has taught us that
European formal education and
socialization deeply implants the mental
chains to replace the visible steel ones of
yesteryear.
It’s not just Black content, Black music,
hereo and sheros; It’s black cultural
methodology that maintains high
expectations and high nurturing.
Education For
Power
Nana JH Clarke called for African-
Centered to be an education for Black
power - real power - manefested by
what we do and how we live.
AYA Education is teaching math,
science, technology, social studies, etc.
taught in ways that instill in our
students the knowledge, skills,
confidence and desire to use their
power to remove others from power
over us, to heal and lift our people so
that our skills and success serve us and
the world - in that order!
WHB Education
African-Centered teaching is teaching
and learning how to be better warriors,
healers, and builders for our people.
Welcome. We need you.
Volunteering
Benefits
Supporting
Projects like the Family-Lore project, the
Sankofa Math project, Liberation Spelling
Bee, Where My Voice Begins - Youth
WHB, The Guardians, Ngolo, and in East
Africa: The Ngvu project need your
support. These projects call for real
family and community engagement and
are often beyond what a teacher can do
alone.
Parents and community are not used to
being a real part of the curriculum and
instruction, so the structures,
expectations, and habits are not in place
to make it readily happen. That’s where
family and community volunteers come
in - carving a road where none existed
before. You learn how to build trust
among us where distrust has been
induced.
Volunteering
Benefits
Benefits
You will help us to continue refining
each of those projects to make them
better and to make them available to a
wider range of families and to formal
and informal organizations who are
attempting to educate our children. We
look forward to offering Saturday
School, after school and setting up
contests and supplemental instruction.
When they have access to these African-
centered, innovative projects, our
children move to the stratosphere. See
below how one of those stellar
supplemental programs The Village
Method (TVM) is using our Family-Lore
project to do just that!
We need you to help refine and expand
that work. You get the satisfaction of
working with a team to heal
oppression’s wounds and the skill of
black team-building.
Sample Middle School
Class: Comparative State History