Excellent book that provides a response to the challenge of motivating Black children. Maxwell's book explores the connection that is missing from the lived experiences of children by drawing on ancient African philosophy. The book is well structured and is serves as a guide for educators seeking to understand how to engage and empower black children in schools.
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What drove you to tell this specific story?
For me, this book is deeply personal. Long before I became a teacher, education consultant or author, I was a little boy growing up in Jamaica with an enormous hunger to learn.
My early childhood was not easy. I grew up for a significant period without my parents present, and there were times when, in a very real sense, I had to send myself to school. But what I remember most strongly is that I wanted knowledge. I wanted to read. I wanted to understand things. Learning became almost an act of liberation for me.
And crucially, the culture surrounding me encouraged that curiosity.
I grew up watching Louise Bennett-Coverley—our beloved Miss Lou—on Ring Ding. Through Miss Lou, Jamaican children heard our own language, stories, humour, songs, folklore and ways of seeing the world treated as things worthy of celebration.
We heard Anansi stories. We learned about our national heroes—people such as Paul Bogle, Samuel Sharpe and George William Gordon. We learned about the Maroons and Jamaica’s extraordinary history of resistance, survival and cultural creativity.
As a child, I didn’t have terminology such as “culturally relevant pedagogy” or “culturally responsive teaching.”
I simply knew that I could see myself in what I was learning.
And that made me want to learn more.
It gave me pride. It made me curious about my ancestors and the wider world. It created a foundation from which I could encounter European literature, history and culture without believing that my own culture was somehow inferior.
That experience stayed with me throughout more than twenty-five years of teaching in Britain and the United States.
I began noticing that many Black children and children from minority cultures were experiencing something very different. They could spend years studying literature, history, philosophy and civilisation while seeing remarkably little of themselves within those traditions.
So It’s Not Just About Grades; It’s About Culture grew from a question that has followed me from that little boy in Jamaica to the educator I am today:
What happens to a child’s relationship with education when education rarely reflects that child’s history, culture or identity?
And conversely, what becomes possible when it does?
But the book goes beyond identifying a problem.
I wanted to give teachers and parents practical tools that they can actually use. That includes affirmations, culturally relevant approaches to learning and the use of Adinkra symbols and the philosophies associated with them as tools for teaching values, identity, character and self-understanding.
Symbols such as Sankofa, for example, carry ideas that children can apply to everyday life: go back and retrieve what is valuable from the past so that you can move forward.
I regard Adinkra not merely as decorative imagery but as part of a West African philosophical tradition that can be used educationally. In that sense, it can perform a role comparable to other philosophical and ethical traditions taught around the world—not because Adinkra and Confucianism, for example, are identical systems, but because both demonstrate how cultural philosophies can transmit ethical principles and practical guidance across generations.
That is the heart of my book: culture can become a tool for intellectual, emotional and moral development.
This year’s theme for Black History Month is ‘Honouring Our Communities’, highlighting leaders, parents and teachers. How can local communities better support Black students when education structures are letting them down?
One of the lessons of my own childhood is that education is much bigger than school.
Some of my most important teachers never stood in front of a blackboard.
They were storytellers. Elders. Writers. Cultural figures such as Miss Lou. They were the people who preserved stories about our national heroes, our language, our music, Anansi and our history.
That is why communities are so important.
If children are not receiving a sufficiently broad picture of themselves through the formal curriculum, families and communities can help complete that picture.
We can establish reading groups, mentoring programmes, Saturday schools, cultural workshops, parent groups, African and Caribbean history programmes, writing circles, museum visits, intergenerational storytelling, rites-of-passage programmes and partnerships between schools, libraries, churches, cultural organisations and local businesses.
Children also need access to living examples of achievement.
Let them meet Black engineers, writers, entrepreneurs, tradespeople, professors, scientists, teachers, artists and community leaders.
Let them discover that Black history isn’t simply a history of things that happened to Black people.
Black people have been thinkers, builders, innovators, philosophers, healers, mathematicians, political leaders, writers, artists and creators throughout human history.
That distinction matters.
I also believe we have to rediscover something that many traditional cultures understood extremely well: raising and educating a child is a communal responsibility.
The school has a responsibility.
Parents have a responsibility.
The community has a responsibility.
And gradually the young person develops responsibility for themselves.
This becomes even more important at a time when societies around the world are wrestling with political polarization, racial division and the growth of authoritarian and extremist movements.
We have to ask ourselves an uncomfortable educational question.
If generations of schooling were supposed to create more knowledgeable and enlightened societies, why has knowledge alone not eliminated racial prejudice, xenophobia, intolerance or ideas of human superiority?
Perhaps one reason is that education has too often transmitted knowledge without sufficiently challenging the inherited hierarchies through which that knowledge has been organised.
Much of modern schooling developed within colonial societies. That history inevitably influenced which cultures were positioned at the centre of knowledge and which were pushed towards its margins.
Inclusive education is therefore not merely an educational fashion.
It is a human imperative.
If communities, parents and teachers work together, education can become one of the places where we begin dismantling inherited ideas of superiority and inferiority and teach children instead that cultural difference does not diminish human worth.
A core argument of your book is that standard education systems hold back Black students and that you advocate for Afrocentric models. How can communities implement better frameworks outside and inside the classroom every day?
We first have to clarify what Afrocentric education means.
It does not mean replacing European history with African history.
It does not mean telling children that one civilisation is superior to another.
That would simply reproduce the very hierarchy I am challenging.
What I am arguing for is something much more intellectually ambitious:
Give children access to the best of humanity.
Teach Greece and Rome.
But why shouldn’t children also encounter the Ashanti?
Teach Shakespeare and Dickens.
But introduce them to Achebe, Baldwin, Angelou, Walcott and other voices from Africa and the African diaspora.
Teach European philosophy.
But let children encounter African philosophical traditions as well.
Explore Britain, Europe and America, but also allow students to encounter the extraordinary diversity of Africa—its kingdoms, intellectual traditions, languages, political systems, literature, art, architecture, spirituality and civilisations.
Africa itself is not one culture any more than Europe is one culture.
Zulu history is not Ashanti history. Ethiopian civilisation is different again. Ancient Egypt represents another enormous field of human achievement and historical inquiry.
Of course children cannot learn everything.
No curriculum can contain the entire human story.
But the crucial question becomes:
Who gets invited into that story?
That is why I include practical tools within the book.
Adinkra philosophy is particularly useful here.
Take Sankofa: the principle of returning to retrieve something valuable from the past so that we can move forward.
Imagine giving a child that idea as a daily philosophy.
Or teaching perseverance, cooperation, humility, wisdom, adaptability and responsibility through culturally meaningful symbols, stories and affirmations.
These are not simply lessons about Africa.
They become tools for living.
Teachers can also make simple changes.
A teacher might connect rhetorical analysis to a speech by James Baldwin or Malcolm X.
Hip-hop and spoken word can become gateways into poetry, metaphor, rhetoric, language and critical analysis.
Students can investigate family history while studying migration.
African proverbs can sit alongside European philosophical quotations.
The classroom becomes intellectually larger rather than smaller.
This is especially important because I believe we are still living with the consequences of an educational model inherited from colonialism—one that frequently positioned Europe as the principal producer of civilisation and knowledge while presenting other cultures as peripheral.
Moving beyond that model does not require rejecting Europe.
It requires expanding humanity.
We don’t move forward by removing one group from the table and replacing it with another.
We move forward by making the table larger.
How can parents build a strong cultural foundation at home that protects their children from systemic biases at school?
I often say to parents:
Teach your children who they are before the world tells them who they are.
That comes directly from my own experience.
As a Jamaican child, I encountered people who looked like me within the stories of my country.
I knew about Paul Bogle.
I knew about Sam Sharpe.
I heard about the Maroons.
I heard Jamaican language spoken unapologetically by Louise Bennett.
I heard Anansi stories filled with intelligence, humour, strategy and survival.
Those experiences quietly communicated something extraordinarily powerful:
You come from people who matter.
That becomes a psychological foundation.
It doesn’t mean teaching a child that their culture is better than anyone else’s.
Quite the opposite.
When children have a secure identity, I believe they are better equipped to encounter other cultures without feeling threatened by them or inferior to them.
Parents can build that foundation through remarkably simple things.
Tell family stories.
Talk about grandparents and great-grandparents.
Build a home library.
Introduce children to African, Caribbean and African-American writers.
Use affirmations.
Introduce them to cultural philosophies and values.
Visit museums.
Travel where possible.
Cook traditional foods together.
Listen to music and discuss where it came from.
Watch documentaries.
Discuss current affairs.
Expose children to scientists, inventors, writers, artists and thinkers from their heritage.
And don’t simply ask:
“How was school today?”
Ask:
“What did you learn?”
“Whose story did you hear?”
“Was there another perspective?”
“Did anything you learned challenge you?”
“Did anything make you curious?”
“Did you see yourself anywhere in what you studied?”
Those questions create critical thinkers.
Parents cannot remove every bias their child may encounter.
But they can ensure that when a stereotype reaches that child, it encounters a young person who already possesses another story about themselves.
I call that cultural armour.
And cultural armour should not isolate children from other people.
Its ultimate purpose is the opposite.
A child who understands their own humanity should be better equipped to recognise humanity in somebody else.
What would you say a diverse classroom looks like in practice?
A diverse classroom is not simply a classroom in which children of different races are sitting next to one another.
That is demographic diversity.
A genuinely diverse education asks a much deeper question:
What knowledge has been allowed into the room?
Look at the bookshelf.
Look at the walls.
Look at the historical figures.
Look at the literature.
Look at the philosophers.
Look at the examples used in mathematics, science and art.
Look at who repeatedly appears as the explorer, inventor, thinker, writer and authority—and who repeatedly appears as the conquered, enslaved, colonised or oppressed.
Those patterns communicate messages to children whether adults intend them to or not.
This connects to something much bigger than schooling.
We are witnessing societies around the world again confronting authoritarianism, racial nationalism, political extremism and deepening division.
Major international democracy monitors have documented a significant global deterioration in democratic freedoms in recent years.
For me, that raises an important educational question.
Has our model of education genuinely taught us how to live together?
We have produced technologically sophisticated societies.
We possess extraordinary scientific knowledge.
Information is available instantaneously.
Yet humanity continues to struggle with racism, religious intolerance, xenophobia, nationalism and beliefs that some groups of people are intrinsically more valuable than others.
That should force educators to reconsider what education is actually for.
Haile Selassie addressed this question powerfully when he spoke before the United Nations General Assembly in 1963.
He argued that until the philosophy holding one race superior and another inferior is permanently rejected, and until skin colour becomes no more significant than eye colour, lasting peace will remain elusive.
More than sixty years later, that warning still deserves serious reflection.
Education has a responsibility here.
If our curricula continually magnify the accomplishments of one part of humanity while diminishing or ignoring others, children may unconsciously absorb a hierarchy of human value.
That is why inclusive education matters.
Consider something as apparently simple as a map.
In September 2026, the United Nations General Assembly supported an initiative encouraging the use of map projections that more accurately represent the relative sizes of continents.
Generations of children have grown accustomed to versions of the Mercator projection in which Africa appears dramatically smaller relative to northern landmasses than it actually is.
Africa is approximately fourteen times the size of Greenland, yet conventional Mercator maps can make the two appear surprisingly comparable.
Think about the symbolism.
A geographical distortion produced for a particular navigational purpose became so familiar that generations stopped noticing the distortion.
Education can sometimes work in exactly the same way.
Certain histories become magnified.
Others become diminished.
Certain voices become “the curriculum.”
Other voices become a heritage-month activity.
For me, correcting the map provides a wonderful metaphor for inclusive education.
We are not making Africa larger than it really is. We are allowing children to see it at its proper scale.
I would say the same about human history.
We don’t need to diminish European achievement in order to recognise African achievement.
We simply need a more accurate map of human achievement.
A genuinely diverse classroom therefore allows students to encounter the Greeks and the Ashanti; Shakespeare and Achebe; European history and African history; Western philosophy alongside intellectual traditions originating elsewhere in the world.
And ultimately, children should encounter Asia, Indigenous civilisations, the Americas and the extraordinary diversity of human thought.
That isn’t lowering academic standards.
That is enlarging knowledge.
What is one core message from It’s Not Just About Grades; It’s About Culture?
If I had to reduce the book to one message, it would begin with:
Identity drives achievement.
But I would now take that one step further.
Inclusive education is essential not only for the success of individual children but for the future of humanity.
And I know the first part of that argument not merely from research or twenty-five years of teaching.
I know it because I lived it.
I was once a little boy in Jamaica, growing up without my parents present for an important part of my childhood, sending myself to school and hungry for knowledge.
Somewhere along the way, people like Louise Bennett told me through language, stories and culture that where I came from mattered.
Anansi mattered.
My ancestors mattered.
My country’s history mattered.
People who looked and sounded like me could possess intelligence, humour, resistance, creativity and wisdom.
That did something to me.
It made me curious.
It gave me pride.
It made me want to read.
It made me want to know more.
Ultimately, it helped make me an educator and a writer.
That is why I am passionate about what happens when culture is removed from education.
We sometimes talk as though culturally relevant education is an optional addition—something we do during Black History Month before returning to the “real” curriculum.
I see it very differently.
Culture is one of the primary ways human beings understand themselves and make meaning of the world.
And at this particular moment in human history, when division, racial nationalism, authoritarianism and intolerance continue to challenge societies around the world, we have to ask whether inherited educational structures are sufficient for the future we are trying to create.
Haile Selassie’s words at the United Nations in 1963 remain relevant precisely because humanity has still not completely abandoned philosophies of racial superiority and inferiority.
Education has to be part of changing that.
That means re-evaluating curricula inherited from colonial structures.
It means asking whose knowledge counts.
It means helping children understand their own heritage while teaching them to respect somebody else’s.
It means giving teachers tools to create culturally inclusive classrooms.
It means giving parents tools—affirmations, stories, philosophies and conversations—to strengthen children’s identity at home.
And it means drawing upon traditions such as Adinkra philosophy not as cultural ornaments but as sources of wisdom.
Sankofa teaches us that sometimes humanity has to look backwards in order to move forwards.
Perhaps education now needs its own Sankofa moment.
We should retain what is valuable from the educational traditions we have inherited, but we must also retrieve voices, philosophies, histories and cultures that were pushed to the margins.
My argument is therefore not that we should replace one cultural canon with another.
It is that the classroom of the future should expose children to the best that humanity has thought, discovered, created and imagined—Africa, Europe, Asia, the Americas, Indigenous cultures and beyond.
There will never be enough time to teach everything.
But every child should receive enough to understand two things:
My people contributed to this human story.
And:
I have a contribution to make to what comes next.
If we can teach that while simultaneously teaching children that someone else’s colour, culture, gender, religion or belief system does not diminish their humanity, then education becomes much more than preparation for examinations.
It becomes preparation for coexistence.
It becomes preparation for citizenship.
It becomes preparation for peace.
That, ultimately, is the central message of It’s Not Just About Grades; It’s About Culture.
Because education should not merely produce successful students.
It should help us produce a more knowledgeable, humane and inclusive world in which every child understands both their own worth and the worth of others.
You can connect with Dwight C. Maxwell via his LinkedIn.
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