A New Founding of Public Education: Young People at the Economic Center of Teaching and Learning

Introduction

Baltimore, Maryland—to take a typical example—spends almost $2 billion a year on its public schools. For this investment, only 71 percent of its students graduate on time. A mere 16 percent of those graduates complete college in six years, and graduates of its vocational programs earn a median $13,000 a year (they aren’t successful plumbers and carpenters; they are part-time cashiers, security guards, and drivers).

Similar statistics can be found everywhere in the country where poverty is concentrated: urban and rural, black, white, Latinx, Native American, and Asian. We don’t need test scores to tell us that the current structure of education, the way it is constituted, fails to secure the blessings of liberty for our posterity.

The causes of this problem have been analyzed in many places. This essay describes a workable strategy—both radical and patient—for addressing it: a new founding of public education. The approach derives from the teaching of the late Robert Moses, key leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi theater of the civil rights movement and founder of the Algebra Project, a political initiative that uses math education as an organizing tool. Dr. Moses’s work was central to the drafting of the Voting Rights Act which “gave teeth” to the Constitution’s 15th Amendment. He later spent decades working on education as the “subtext of the right to vote” and advocated for a constitutional amendment that would name education as a federal right, envisioning more decades of work that would eventually give teeth to that amendment.

My approach in this essay derives from Dr. Moses’s teaching but takes a different tack. An intermediate step before a constitutional amendment might be to organize around a free-standing “Constitution for Public Education.” With his mentors Ella Baker and Amzie Moore, Dr. Moses in 1964 helped create the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as a parallel institution that successfully fractured the iceberg of political white supremacy. Similarly, a Constitution for Public Education could be drafted in our era and used immediately as an organizing tool to enact a set of principles for democratic, as opposed to caste-based, education. The success of such a project would hinge on the nature of the images in which it is conceived. The U.S. Constitution was conceived in the image of “no kings.” The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was conceived in the image of black people from all economic classes doing politics as first-class citizens, from sharecroppers to the college educated. The essay that follows suggests an image for conceiving a new founding of public education.

Preamble to a New Constitution of Education

“Every middle school student will have the expectation that when they are in high school, they will have a good-paying job, sharing knowledge or skills with their peers, younger children, or adults in their community. ¨

I propose this sentence as the preamble to a new ¨Constitution for Public Education.” A preamble should include the principles, in a concentrated form, that will be enacted through the body of the constitution itself. Though we might not yet be ready to write the full constitution, this essay elaborates the principles collected in our apparently simple sentence, so that a public conversation on how to enact those principles can begin.

Some readers will object already that the sentence is too practical or limited, because preambles should be more noble and ambitious, but in times when everyone claims the title of “We the People” for their own party, a practical preamble might unify us more. To be clear: the proposal is not to create an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The proposal is rather to create a new foundation for public education based on principles that the great majority of the nation’s people already share.

          Not what adults do, but what young people do

The most important principle contained in our preamble is that it says nothing directly about what adults should expect or do, but focuses entirely on something young people must expect and do. The reason for beginning with the middle schoolers’ expectations will be discussed below. The center of the sentence is the action of young people of high school age: they “share knowledge and skills”—teach, coach, facilitate, lead, and organize. The preamble to our new constitution for public education says nothing yet about how they acquire the knowledge and skills that they share. We do not automatically invoke a role for adults: it is entirely possible that the high school student, who is also a teacher, learned something useful from another young person. This is, of course, what young people do all over the world every day: learn from each other—dances, songs, language, games, styles, codes, places to find things, people to trust or shun, and on and on.

We will come to the crucial role of adults and elders later, which is a principle also implicit in this preamble, but constitutions are written when there is a problem to be solved; they are never written when things are going smoothly. They propound wishes and ideals. But notice: you don’t wish for something you already have, and an ideal is something difficult to attain. We are wishing for young people to be right at the center of their own education. The failed plan of education that our schools currently attempt to enact certainly does not place young people at the center. They are currently at the bottom—beneath standards and mandates and school boards and principals and teachers and grades.

Notice, too, our new constitution of education puts at the center not what the young people know, but what they do with what they know. Many things could be said about this distinction, but for the moment we stress the transparency of action as opposed to the very private experience of knowledge. Many confusions in schools arise from the structures purportedly used to “assess learning.” Here, in this statement of principles, we restrict “assessment,” in a sense, to what is public and visible. A student who effectively teaches something, knows that thing. You watch what they do, and to that extent you know what they have learned.

          Education as Public Action

But the emphasis on action is related to assessment only incidentally. The key principle is that action is necessarily public and in the open. You cannot share knowledge or skills with someone entirely in private: at least one learner must be present with you. At the foundation of our constitution is the idea that public education is a social enactment, whether your role is teacher, learner, parent, or citizen.

Despite the terrible confusions of the education wars today, the outrage over what is taught or not taught, what books are read or not read, who is included or excluded, who is made to feel shame, the role of families and of our apparently divergent values, this principle—that education is a social enactment—is common to all sides. It is why we care so deeply about what children experience in schools. Beyond curriculum and standards, we want the social context of learning to conform to our values because we understand that schools are places where children are socialized. They are socialized in families, communities, churches, synagogues, mosques, summer camps, and sports leagues, too. But a system of public education is a commitment to social enactments—it is not only about intellectual activity, so-called “content,” but is also about ways of relating, about what people are doing with each other, and so about what we hope or fear our children will do, too.

          The Economic Role of Young People in the 21st Century

This central strategy of young people sharing knowledge and skills for a significant wage is appealing to virtually all families across social, ethnic, and economic spectrums. Encouraging young people to act in ways that are at once economic, educational, and publicly engaged opens a theater of action that cuts across ideology and so satisfies one of the key requirements for public education: the great majority of parents and young people can get behind it.

This picture of high school students sharing knowledge and skills with peers and younger children is attractive because all families are concerned about the narrowing of socially or economically useful roles for adolescents. Economic changes that have taken place over two hundred years have forced young people into an impossible kind of stasis. When most people lived on farms, children had economically productive roles from very young ages. As economic activity shifted to cities, both younger and older adolescents found employment in commercial and bureaucratic settings. Industrialization opened up employment for adolescents in factories and mines, shipyards and railroads. Much of this employment, of course, was cruel and exploitive, and throughout the process of urbanization and industrialization there was widespread anxiety about the trouble “idle” youth could cause. Universal public education, especially universal public secondary education (which only became a reality in the 1960s), was largely rationalized not to prepare youth for employment, but to protect society from the dangers of young people, now gathered together in cities, with too little to do.

But the situation is much worse today. Apart from a few retail industries which have yet to be fully automated, most young people have no role in a knowledge-based economy until they complete not only high school and college, but also additional years of graduate or technical training or some vague amount of “work experience.” Adolescence has effectively been extended economically and socially up to age 25 or beyond. The consequence of this for low-and middle-income families is a historically novel economic problem. In earlier periods, as recently as the 1960s and 70s, older adolescents could viably earn their own living. That possibility is rare today except for some illegal forms of employment; and the need to attend school and college for purposes of future employment competes for time with the need to earn survival wages immediately.

The emotional and intellectual consequence of this extended adolescence in high schools is a startling disaffection and alienation, not for all students of course, but for the great majority. Many young people see their economic role simply as consumers, and though they may pick up a sequence of minimum wage, essentially menial jobs as adolescents, they find themselves having to continue in that kind of employment into their twenties, at a loss for how to step into true adult roles.

Of course, this is painting with a broad brush, and middle- or upper-class families are able to subsidize the extended adolescence of their own children through college and beyond in ways that are sometimes not unbearable for the children. But the problem of finding an economically independent adult role persists for those families, too. Automation and the development of artificial intelligence will continue to force young people towards social limbo, and many adolescents in the least affluent families already find themselves trapped in a hopeless cycle of economic precarity with no end in sight. Our new constitution of public education therefore centers on productive roles for adolescents in a knowledge economy, roles that do not have to wait until the conclusion of formal education.

          The Capacities of Young People

This brings us to another principle: a young person does not have to know everything about a topic or field of interest to be able to participate in sharing their knowledge. In Baltimore, young people on a small scale are currently paid to do all of the following: lead math games focused on prime factorization, instruct youth videography crews, conduct oral histories, direct plays, analyze air and water quality to inform their community associations, teach art and music in summer camps and after school, coach and judge debate, and more. Organizations like the Algebra Project, The Young People’s Project, Wide Angle Youth Media, and others have successfully paid millions of dollars in wages to thousands of young people over decades.

This principle has ramifications for how we think about school schedules and structures of learning. Once we understand young people as teachers at the center of education, we can discover better ways to use time and space. For example, elementary and middle school teachers are overwhelmed; but high school-age co-teachers could help address their inability to give individual attention to all their students. If we adjust the typical school schedule, three or four high school students could work daily for a wage in every elementary school classroom reading one-to-one, helping with writing or math, or taking an upset child for a walk. The high schoolers who teach in an elementary school in the morning can later take part in a peer-facilitated seminar on history or a conversation group in Spanish, where they become the learners. They can play in a sports league refereed and coached by paid peers, or do chemistry experiments or carpentry in a lab or shop run by peers. This kind of learning could obviously extend from morning till evening if we allow enough flexibility in scheduling for young people to staff, as well as to be taught, in multiple settings. And, of course, such a structure frees up opportunities for highly skilled adult teachers to focus on interesting problems like developing curriculum, helping students or peer teacher-learner pairs overcome difficulties, learning new technologies, and so on.

          Education as Imitation of Roles

High school students in elementary and middle school classrooms, coaching sports, or teaching arts and music are useful for more than the immediate instruction. Smaller children don’t only learn from teenagers, they want to be teenagers; they imagine themselves becoming older. We have been wasting a huge resource by letting young children think all they have to emulate is their older brothers’ and sisters’, cousins’ and neighbors’ style, instead of helping them understand that they can also emulate their older peers’ substance. In fact, the most stylish things are substantial; not only a look, but also a talent, and not only a talent, but also some economic reward from sharing one’s talent is extremely attractive, especially to young adolescents.

This is why the preamble begins with middle schoolers’ expectations. A principle of continuity and progression must be at the heart of every viable educational culture. Our current education system generally teaches us to expect that children will put time and effort into challenging work only because of an external incentive structure. They must be bribed or threatened with grades, with promotion or retention, with graduation or failure or they won’t apply themselves seriously to their work. But this obsession with incentive structures is unnatural and contrary to many basic experiences of learning. It cannot be the foundation of a healthy culture, because incentive structures are not the sort of things that get passed down from one generation to the next. What gets passed from generation to generation are roles, ways of acting, patterns of relationship.

Children spend hours, days, months perfecting a dance step, a basketball dribble, or a style of drawing with no grade to motivate them at all. These activities, even if performed alone, are not performed in a vacuum. They match the cultural ways of the people around them—match and extend them, often imitating older peers while adding, perhaps, an individual style. A young child expects that their dancing, athletic ability, or artistry will mature, and that others may later look up to them for some talent or skill they have developed. We are promoting the idea that in a healthy culture the same expectation could be systematically fostered about the acquisition of knowledge.

A healthy structure of motivation requires forms of relationship that allow people to grow in conformity to roles they already see around them. And those roles must be rich enough, plentiful enough, accessible enough that young people can decide to risk something by becoming more than what they already are. One mentor or role model is not enough: there must be a generation of mentors, older peers, to give evidence that a structure of growth into admirable ways of living is viable and sustainable.

That extensive structure of motivation is implied in the middle schoolers’ expectations. This word “expectation” has been twisted by the current system of education, and we should return it to its older meaning of looking forward to something, being excited, hoping and striving, like a mother who is expecting, or a child anticipating a birthday or an adventure. Adults and supervisors talk about having “high expectations” for children or employees, and report cards announce whether a child has “met” or “not met” expectations; but this use of the word conjures pictures of stern authority, a demanding set of consequences without which children or workers will sink into mediocrity. Adult “expectations” have none of the eager anticipation that our preamble invokes because the preamble highlights the middle school child’s awareness of opportunity, not the adult’s power to judge.

Lifting up children’s expectations is very different from what some people describe as “unstructured” because it is wholly realistic in context. That is, children growing up in a context where their older peers are productively employed in knowledge-work will naturally expect that they, too, will grow into similar roles as they mature. It isn’t a question of adult teachers following the middle schoolers’ feelings or whims; we are saying that middle schoolers’ feelings will conform to the examples of their older peers, as in fact middle schoolers’ feelings always conform to the example of their older peers.

          The Roles of Adults

Next, the preamble implies principles for adults’ roles in enacting this new constitution for public education. For there to be well-paid jobs in knowledge-work, we must put public money into youth employment year-round. Currently, we put vast amounts of money into policing, incarceration, and military weaponry. Take Baltimore as an example: The city’s police budget is almost $600 million annually. A $10,000 job for every one of the 20,000 current Baltimore high school students would cost $200 million. An argument could clearly be made for gradually shifting one-third of the police budget towards systematic youth employment in knowledge-work. In addition, Maryland spends roughly $300 million a year on incarcerating and supervising adjudicated youth, not to mention the nearly $2 billion spent on the city school system, some portion of which could certainly go towards paid peer teaching.  There will be an adult infrastructure, too, that must be funded to support young people’s organized teaching, and we must commit ourselves to creating and paying for that infrastructure. We must extend the adult work already begun in many places to offer pedagogies, curriculum, schedules, materials, and settings that support young people interacting with each other in these daring new ways. But some portion of that $2 billion a year, for example, could reasonably be used to reorient the teachers, support staff, and administrators who already work in the school system. Adults must learn to be open to young people’s expectations and relationships as the center of a new constitution for public education. If we do not play our part, the young people will not be able to play theirs. But their part is at the foundation because they are the ones growing up. We make and protect room for them to explore the creation of their own culture of learning.

          Youth Employment as Preparation for a New Economy

The last principle to elaborate is the idea of a job. Our public schools currently presume a structure of employment that is founded on private enterprise creating jobs. Nothing in our projected constitution forbids this private structure of job creation. But just as we understand public high schools as preparation for adult life, we could also think about public youth employment as preparation for adult employment. Patterns of adult employment in the information economy have changed and will change even more drastically in the future. Both the structure of education and of youth employment should adapt in anticipation of the next economy, rather than belatedly chasing the last one.

Apprenticeships are a practice designed to link novices to current developments in an industry, and are a common and popular concept across ideologies. Our preamble extends the idea of apprenticeships in several important ways. First, everyone should expect that they will have an “apprenticeship” in knowledge work. We might think of all 14-year-olds, for example, as apprentices to 17-, 18-, or 22-year-olds for several hours a day. Second, there must be significant pay—not inadequate “stipends”—for high school students to address their material need and to emphasize the real, productive contribution they are making to their community (in current dollars, $10,000-$12,000 a year meets that goal). And third, a systematic structure of youth employment will stimulate youth-to-youth economic interactions in ways that are different from typical apprenticeships. For example, the Baltimore Algebra Project contracted with Wide Angle Youth Media to make a video about their math work, which they then used to attract capital. And some of the youth videographers then sought help with their math from the Algebra Project’s young math teachers. We could envision a whole economy of youth enterprises, underwritten by public capital, but able to extend their interactions into a cooperative community exchange.

Conclusion

The principles described above are contained implicitly in our preamble. The fleshed-out constitution for public education must describe first, what rights and obligations young people have, next, what rights and obligations older people have, and then mechanisms for negotiating among the contradictions and competing priorities that any such structure will necessarily expose. There are questions of local variation and federal uniformity as with the U.S. Constitution. There are questions about finance. And even a written down constitution for public education will be just the beginning, not the end, of all kinds of wrangling.

But the function of any constitution as a systematic calculus of wishes and ideals is to map out a structure of motivation that explains what we are trying to do. Our preamble begins this process: “Every middle school student will have the expectation that when they are in high school, they will have a good-paying job, sharing knowledge or skills with peers, younger children, or adults in their community.” Motivation in this preamble is seen as emerging from young people’s confidence that they can grow into roles where their knowledge is valued and where their actions contribute to the public good and to the continuity of a culture of social cooperation into the next generation.

Granted, the strategy proposed here will be seen as both expensive and tangent to most current struggles over education policy. Nevertheless, a broad consensus already exists about the principles:

1.      Education should focus on what children need, not what adults need.

2.      Young people learn eagerly from other young people.

3.      Adolescents need meaningful things to do, and children are most eager to do things in social contexts with other people of their own age and also with people older than they are who are interested in helping them grow to adulthood.

4.      The economic burden on poor and middle-income families is too great, and if young people can contribute to family income without harming their own education, they should.

5.      It makes more sense to reduce crime and addiction by spending money at the front end on productive roles for young people than on the back end of policing, incarceration, and drug treatment.

6.      We are unlikely as a country to quickly resolve our differences of educational philosophy, but we already largely agree that all young people can contribute something to their communities, and that paying them to contribute meaningfully would be a good idea if we can afford it.

If some of us begin to apply this consensus and enact our principles in specific jurisdictions and communities, the benefits will quickly be seen. The failed plan of education currently at work does not need to be attacked head on, at least not immediately. Instead, powerful new relationships and capacities will emerge from young people finding themselves at the center of their own teaching and learning. Cohorts of adolescents growing up through such structures will soon be adults themselves, able to articulate the rights and obligations of both young people and older people under a new constitution of public education. Let us begin now to discuss what a new founding of public education would mean for our communities and for our country.

    

Preamble to a New Constitution for Public Education

Preamble to a New Constitution for Education by jay gillen

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Decades too late, Part 3

Jarvis Givens reminds us that this very period, the 1920s and 30s, included the founding and development of Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History outside of established school bureaucracies. By 1928 the Association had close to 2,000 members in more than 40 states. Through independent journals, convenings, local state associations, textbook publishing, and other printed materials like posters and circulars, the Association intentionally countered the official curriculum of the American School with a curriculum that emphasized the dignity of Black life, both in its positive achievements and in its resistance to oppression. Givens describes the Association’s work as an extension of “fugitive pedagogy” in the sense that young people learned this counter-narrative in places and by methods largely hidden from official view, though often right within the very school buildings formally dedicated to the American Curriculum.

We should also note that Woodson himself left a position at Howard University and refused work there and at any other institution where White benefactors were likely to constrain his teaching. Nevertheless, his publications and ideas (including Negro History Week, which began in 1921) influenced the practical pedagogy of thousands of teachers within White-supported schools for Black children. Often, when his influence was discovered, teachers were disciplined or dismissed. Nevertheless, despite the relatively small numbers of African Americans with access to secondary and post-secondary education before World War II, this strand of Black self-teaching and educational self-determination was systemtically developed through efforts like Woodson’s and his thousands of followers.

The effect of World War II and its aftermath on education in the United States is impossible to overstate. I don’t know of any thorough treatment of this subject and won’t go into depth here, other than to list some important themes:

1. The military’s demand for personnel resulted in more than 1.5 million African Americans serving in the armed forces. This would have been impossible without the decision by President Franklin Roosevelt to end the practice of involuntary servitude through convict leasing and peonage. Bob Moses often cited Attorney General Francis Biddle’s Circular 3591, issued on Dec 12, 1941—only five days after Pearl Harbor—in which Biddle instructed U.S. attorneys to prosecute cases of involuntary servitude that had previously been allowed to go un-prosecuted. Biddle’s and Roosevelt’s principal motivation was the need for Black male bodies to throw into war, but another motivation was the propaganda liability of Black second-class citizenship in light of official claims that Germany and Japan promoted theories of racial superiority, not the United States.

2. The huge numbers of returning Black soldiers after the war resulted in an unforeseen political dynamic; many soldiers’ eyes were opened to the possibility of a life with dignity and self-respect, and many had learned and developed new skills that they were anxious to put to work in building their lives and their commuities’ lives. The dynamism of these returning soldiers can be found undergirding every aspect of the Civil Rights Movement through the 1950s and 60s, including demands for educational equality. For example, Oliver L. Brown of Kansas and Harry Briggs of South Carolina were both Black veterans whose children became plaintiffs in Brown v. Board, decided in 1954.

3. Largely through economic effects of labor shortages during the war and agricultural mechanization, the transition from rural to urban economies was vastly accelerated. The1940s and 50s saw the movement of almost 3 million Black people from the South to the North (compared with only 400,000 in the 1930s). Bob Moses begins Radical Equations with the invention of the first mechanical cotton picker in 1944—a development whose importance he likens to the invention of the programmable computer the year before.

For the purposes of this post’s telling of the story, I want to focus on the last item above. The movement of White people from rural into industrial urban economies began in the last half of the 19th century and accelerated in the first half of the 20th century. This transition spurred the development of the urban education systems, first in the North, then in the South so that by the 1940s attendance at high school (at least to 10th grade) was the norm for the White population. Part of the thinking behind the systematic institutionalization of secondary education was the need for greater literacy and numeracy in an industrial economy, but much of the motivation was simply the danger of large concentrations of idle adolescents with limited economic roles to play—in contrast to their former usefulness in agriculture (obviated by farm mechanization).

Large concentrations of idle Black adolescents in cities, however, was limited to a few parts of a few Northern cities until the 1950s and 60s. Before World War II, secondary education was not the norm for African Americans. It was only during the heyday of America’s urban industrial expansion in the 1950s and 60s that the White administrative hierarchy decided secondary education needed to become universal. But for the average Black person, this educational transition was already several decades too late.

Young Black people only began to get widespread access to the type of secondary education designed to integrate them into an industrial economy when that economy was on the verge of decline. Baltimore’s population, for example, was at it’s maximum in 1950. White families’ exodus to the suburbs led to shrinking economic resources for the growing, but poorer, Black population arriving in the city. By the 1970s economic recession had set in, and the peak of manufacturing employment in the U.S. was 1979. So it was really only one generation of Black people—those who went to high school in the late 50s and 60s--for whom the official structure of education was even potentially a fit for the economic roles that might lead them out of low-caste status. In fact, most still did not graduate from high school, and the work available to the majority of African Americans remained drudgery, underemployment, or no work at all.

When we think about the massive rise of Black incarceration in the period following—the 1980s and 90s—it is important to study the interlocking effects of education and employment patterns, as well as policing and judicial policies. To review:

1. Pre- Civil War: Enslaved labor needed no formal education at all.

2. Reconstruction: Recently liberated people sought education as a way of entering into full citizenship. Most Black people worked in agriculture and needed little beyond simple literacies for their employment. Even that was opposed by many Whites, who thought education should teach subservience, not skills or knowledge.

3. Jim Crow Era: The industrializing economy directed White people towards urban centers where high school became a norm. Black people received no more than primary education and remained mostly in agricultural or menial economic roles. Not all, but the majority of Black people were excluded from full employment in industry, professions or trade, and so were not thought to need secondary education let alone university.

4. Post World War II: Farm mechanization and urban-based war industries (including enlistment in the army during the Korean and Vietnam Wars) drove millions of Black Southerners towards Northern cities. Attendance for one or two years of high school became the norm for Black youth. But shrinking urban economies and deindustrialization set in by the 1970s, resulting in even more limited economic roles than had been available in war-time.

The 1980s and 90s presented a clear problem that still affects us today. The country had no plan at all for the economic roles of people who had previously been assigned to employment that required little to no education. Employment in that sector shrunk catastrophically: farm labor, factory labor, mine labor, porters, servants, and so on employ millions fewer people today than in 1940. High school attendance became compulsory not because there was a plan to incorporate Black youth into a post-industrial economy, but simply to keep Black youth off the streets. The rise of mass incarceration coincides with the elimination of viable economic roles for low-caste people in America because the country has refused to accept the fact that it must rethink the what economic roles are even possible in the 21st century. (Europe and East Asia took a somewhat different approach by seriously implementing educational tracks that led to skilled-labor roles in a changing economy. In Europe this effort was supported by much more prominent trade union movements than in the U.S. Nevertheless, a similar mismatch between economic roles and labor force has developed in Europe with rising rates of immigration.)

For higher-caste youth, there is a plan—not entirely viable, but at least it’s a plan. Stay in school, go to college, develop some capacities in a knowledge-based economy, and then see if you can adapt to the rapidly changing world of entrepreneurship, technology, and information-age employment. While you are developing those knowledge-based skills, your middle and upper class families will make sure that your material needs are met.

Lower-caste youth are told to follow the same plan, but the same plan has no chance of working for the vast majority of them because their families are not able to ensure that their material needs are met during the decade or more of adolescence and young adulthood in which they are supposed to develop their knowledge-based skills.

The key point is that young people become aware during middle and high school that the economic roles of their older brothers and sisters—and of their parents—do not jibe with what they are told about schooling. Many of their family members and neighbors have completed high school, some have completed one or two years of college, but the employment available even to those “successful” family members often remains poorly compensated, undignified, and unsatisfying. Not always but in general, what people around them learned in school has little or no bearing on their actual employment beyond some very basic literacy skills. The question of relevance in high school is not only, “Do curricular topics appeal to the interests of an adolescents?” but also, “Does the project of schooling seem relevant to the material and social demands of the world they are growing up into?” Generally speaking, school does not function to increase access to higher caste status. Young people realize, usually in high school, that school teaches you your caste status. Therefore, it is more rational to accept your caste status and get a job at McDonald’s to pick up some cash so you can pay for a phone, some clothes, and a prom ticket then to put time into studying almost any academic subject; the evidence of your own experience in your community proves that even those who studied in school still have trouble meeting their material needs after graduation.

Again, there is another stream of the story—the stream of self-determination in Black education where the promise of learning for excellence, dignity, and full participation in political and social life remains the explicit purpose. Thousands of wonderful teachers both in and out of schools advance this purpose every day. However, this work remains fugitive and subversive; the explicit goals of official education prioritize integration into the existing social structure, which insists on the unworthiness of large swathes of people. Our current social structure cannot do without a caste of largely excluded people who are ranked as relatively worthless in the intensely competitive 21st century, just as they were ranked as unthinking “property” in the agrarian economy, and as “menial” labor in the industrial economy. There is no need to educate that “worthless” caste beyond what is necessary for them to know their place.

In summary, the official education of Black people in America from colonial times to the present has been designed to help Black children grow up into the country they lived in. Slaves did not need to know how to read, so they were not taught. Newly freed men and women demanded access to literacy, but they did not need literacy to work as sharecroppers and servants, and if their children were allowed any schooling at all it was only a few years to quiet the demands of their families. Servants, porters, “menials,” on the outer edge of the growing industrial economy similarly needed little school learning to perform their roles, and in fact access to real industrial education put them into competition with White workers, so they were rarely allowed to proceed into high school as industrial economies took off in the beginning of the 20th century. It was only after World War II, when the majority of the population, White and Black, had migrated from farms to cities that high school became standard for Black people. But that was not—for the most part—to prepare them for productive economic roles; it was mostly to keep them off the city streets where it was feared they would cause trouble. And still today, the country has no clear picture of the economic role that the previously menial caste will play, so school almost overtly prepares most Black and working class young people for nothing at all.

Six years after graduation, young people in Baltimore who successfully complete a vocational course in high school earn a median of $13,000 a year, according to a recent study. School prepares them to work at a 7-Eleven for 25 hours a week. That’s where things stand. What will we do?

Decades too late, Part 2

Despite the economic and political obstacles and despite persistent violent attacks, scattered across the North and South as part of the black people’s self-determined social and cultural development were a small number of high schools for black students and some colleges, mainly for developing teachers who could teach in the primary schools and to grow a class of organized “intellectuals,” as James Anderson puts it, who could lead “freed people to an appreciation of their historic responsibility to develop a better society” (29). In the early black high schools and universities, the few students who could afford to attend studied Greek and Latin, geometry, history, science, philosophy, and foreign languages. Anderson emphasizes that the purpose of these studies was not to imitate white people (most of whom had little education themselves), but to acquire the analytic skills necessary to understand their position as new citizens in a free society.

White business and political leaders—in this period—felt the need to restrict this direction of Black education: “They called for the special instruction of the former slaves in a manner that could not be adapted from the curriculum and teaching materials of the classical liberal tradition” (Anderson 31). What they decided to use and promote as the most efficient way to prepare black people for their assigned economic and civic roles was the Hampton-Tuskegee model, developed by the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in the last decades of the 19th century. Gen. Samuel Armstrong and Booker T. Washington were the respective founders of these teacher preparation colleges.

Many people today have heard of the Booker T. Washington vs. W.E.B. DuBois “debates.” The two men are usually cast as representing opposing educational philosophies: (1) Washington’s practical, industrial and business education for the masses to develop their own enterprises vs. (2) liberal arts education promoted for DuBois’s “talented tenth,” an intellectual vanguard. But Chapters 2 and 3 of Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South goes into great detail to explain that the Hampton-Tuskegee model ( supported by Washington only until around 1920) had very little to do with practical self-help and self-determination. Particularly surprising, given popular accounts of the debates, is that Gen. Armstrong, Washington’s teacher and mentor, opposed black enfranchisement and political liberation. His purpose was entirely to ensure that the newly emancipated population would learn to accept their subordinate role without the need for White people to resort to force to keep them in line.

“Hampton was neither a college nor a trade school but a normal school [for the training of elementary school teachers] composed of elementary school graduates who were seeking additional years of schooling…so that they might qualify for a common school teaching certificate” (Anderson 35). At the core of this teacher preparation was manual labor, designed to teach students “‘how to work steadily and regularly, to attend promptly at certain hours to certain duties’”:

As [Gen. Samuel] Armstrong put it in his last report, ‘We do not mean to say that much is not learned by every faithful student in these departments; he or she will be a better cook, laundress, or farmer, and surely much needed lessons in promptness and thoroughness are inculcated, but still the object in view is not to teach a trade but to get the work done.’ Such jobs were no more instructive in ideas and skills of ‘self-help’ and ‘self-sufficiency’ than the hoeing, picking, mining, washing, and ironing that black southerners had done as slaves for centuries. Armstrong required his prospective teachers to perform the same routinized drudgery as the working class that they were destined to instruct so that the teachers would stand as exemplars of the ‘dignity of labor.’ His great fear was that black pupils, under teachers trained in the literary or academic tradition, might come to view formal schooling as an avenue to escape hard toil. Hampton’s emphasis on the moral value of hard labor in contrast to technical and skill training evidenced Armstrong’s concern with the economic adjustment rather than advancement of black southerners. Hampton’s theme, ‘Education for Life,’ meant the training of blacks to adjust to the life that had been carved out for them within an oppressive social order. (Anderson 35-37)

It is this model of education for the acceptance of subordinate roles that became tremendously popular from the point of view of White philanthropists and officials. Booker T. Washington’s prominence after his 1895 speech at the Atlanta Exposition earned the Hampton-Tuskegee model even more support from White people. But as Armstrong writes, “Washington and Tuskegee were Armstrong and Hampton in blackface” (73):

Yet, with all the talk about industrial training, both contemporary observers and later historians mistakenly assumed that trade, technical, and commercial training formed the essence of Washington’s educational philosophy…In 1903 Daniel C. Smith, Tuskegee’s auditor, made a study of the school’s industrial training program. According to Smith, of 1,550 students, “there were only a dozen students in the school capable of doing a fair job as joiners. There were only fifteen boys who could lay brick.” “Meanwhile,” Smith continued, “the number of students who are doing unskilled drudgery work is increasing, and the number who receive no training through the use of tools is getting to be very large.” This finding was not inconsistent with Tuskegee’s aims. Nor was Tuskegee’s failure to teach commercial or business subjects, despite Washington’s preachings about economic development as the only salvation of black Americans. In 1906, in assessing Tuskegee’s endeavors in the teaching of business and commercial subjects, Robert E. Park discovered that “There is a large amount of business conducted by the school, but there is no school of business here.” There were “a large number of stenographers employed on the ground but stenography and typewriting are not taught here.” Three papers and a number of pamphlets were published at Tuskegee, but printing was not taught there. There was not even a formal course in bookkeeping. (Anderson 75)

White people’s patronage and support for the Hampton-Tuskegee model is characteristic of White involvement in the education of Black Americans. The economic role that the country prepares for any subset of the population determines the educational opportunities, structures, and aims of their schools.

Some African Americans, like Washington, worked to fit themselves into the structures orchestrated by White philanthropists and policy makers. Many, however, did not and worked persistently in the strand of what Givens calls “fugitive pedagogy.” James Anderson writes a detailed case study of Fort Valley High and Industrial School in Georgia (later Fort Valley Normal and Industrial School and eventually Fort Valley State University). The school was founded in 1895 by a group of formerly enslaved men led by John Davison, who had been educated at Atlanta University. Initially, Fort Valley was designed to mirror the priorities of Atlanta University (where W.E.B. DuBois would soon find a home); the founders stressed the intellectual development of students who would later become teachers and cultural leaders, prepared through rigorous studies in the liberal arts. As the Fort Valley website still boasts today, in 2024, “One of the first graduates of the young school was Austin Thomas Walden, who graduated in 1902 and became Georgia’s first black judge since Reconstruction.” The design of the school was clearly not to teach accommodation to drudgery, but to teach freedom.

As Davison looked for Northern sponsors to support the practically penniless school, he quickly came under pressure to shift priorities toward what powerful philanthropists called “industrial education.” These philanthropists, George Foster Peabody and William H. Baldwin among them, planned carefully to expand the Hampton-Tuskegee model, even establishing systems of inspection to weed out “fake industrial schools…that gave too much attention to academic training” (Anderson 118). Anderson cites a letter from Davison to Peabody in which the formerly enslaved champion of Black education writes: “I have always thought…that the colored man, when it comes to schools for his own people, should not only have considerable voice, but should be required to largely govern them, for the object of all education is to develop the power of self-government” (130). The philanthropists wouldn’t have it; they threatened to withhold funding unless a principal was appointed who was committed to industrial education. Davison was first forced to attend Hampton himself for a summer course in “industrial education” and was soon compelled to resign as school principal.

Eventually Henry A. Hunt was appointed principal. He quickly instituted courses in “sewing, cooking, carpentry, and gardening” and replaced teachers whom Davison had hired for their academic interests and intellectual independence with a new faculty that would embrace the teaching of drudgery. This revised aim for Valley Fort greatly pleased both the Northern sponsors and Georgia authorities and established a base for the “Hamptonization” of secondary education right in the center of the former Confederacy. (I will study the interesting case of Henry Hunt in a later post. Anderson treats Hunt as signficantly compromised by comparison with Davison; Hunt traded the education of autonomous citizens for the status and funding granted by Northern philanthropists. But Hunt is also one of the heroes of Vanessa Siddle-Walker’s The Education of Horace Tate; in Siddle-Walker’s account, Hunt skillfully hid his true ambitions for the Black community behind a carefully calibrated subterfuge and then passed his knowledge of how to survive and maniputlate White people to his protege, Horace Tate. Could both versions of Hunt be accurate? How do we parse the contradictions?)

The pattern of Northern White support for “industrial” education continued across the South during the early part of the 20th century. But it is crucial to understand that “industrial” referred to the lowest forms of manual labor, especially as farmhands and domestic workers, not as preparation for skilled trades. In fact, the end of World War I and continuing population shifts from rural to urban employment resulted in a severe shrinking of economic opportunities for Black people in the South. Anderson cites many contemporary reports:

In Charlotte, North Carolina, the heavy trucks and transfers were being manned by white workers where black workers had formely been. Moreover, “White school boys are taking the place of Negro elevator girls”…In Kansas City, Missouri, black waitresses were dismissed for a large drugstore and replaced by white females… “[I]n Spartanburg, South Carolina, white men are taking many of the jobs formerly done by Negroes such as driving express wagons and portering.” Similarly in Columbia, South Carolina, white workers had replaced black workers as drivers of garbage and dirt wagons fot he city. Black workers in the same city were “losing out in the building trades.” In Atlanta, Georgia, there was a general feeling among black workers “that the jobs they were losing to whites resulted from premeditation and proscription.” (Anderson 230, citing reports by Ira Reid in the Julius Rosenwald Fund Papers).

Note that this replacement of Black workers by White workers pre-dated the Great Depression. The pressure on Black urban employment was caused primarily by shifting populations from farmlands to cities, rather than by economic contraction. Cities, including in the South, were growing and industrializing rapidly.

The effect on White efforts to attend to the education of Black children and youth again followed White ideas about the caste status of Black people generally. Understanding that education in skilled trades would put Blacks in competition with Whites for better-paying urban employment, White philanthropists shifted their investments away from their previous emphasis on “industrial education,” bogus as it was. I quote at length from Anderson, because his summary of the trend is so important for understanding the later 20th and early 21st centuries.

The philanthropists now faced a blank wall. The rampant displacement of black workers from even the lowest rung of the industrial ladder posed anew the question of what could be accomplished by the industrial education of black youth. The philanthropists’ astonishing answer was to terminate their movement to industrialize black secondary education and to turn their wealth and power more fully toward shaping black collegiate education. During the late 1920s, Hampton and Tuskegee abandoned their industrial training programs and soon became the two best-endowed black colleges for liberal arts education. The black federal land-grant colleges, built to foster agriculture and industrial educaiton, were also transformed into basically liberal arts institutions. A system of higher education, however, presupposed the existence of academic high schools with adequate courses of study taught during a definite series of years by competent instructors. Yet it was that system of eduation which the philanthropists, in cooperation with southern state and local governments, had used their wealth and power to subordinate to the perceived necessity of training blacks to fit into the South’s caste-ridden economy. Without question, the great economic expenditures and reform crusades for black industrial education contributed directly and significantly to the underdevelopment of black secondary schools.

But Anderson goes even further. The push towards “industrial education” perverted what could have been a natural progress towards education for both freedom and economic empowerment. Remember, the end of the Civil War brought enormous energy towards the creation of Black educational establishments where the purpose of education was understood as allowing full participation in all aspects of the country’s life. The North was in the early stages of the shift from a primarily agricultural to a primarily industrial economy, and the South had not yet begun this shift. Over the next 50 years, roughly 1880 - 1930, this economic transformation resulted for White people in the expansion of education from universal primary education to near-universal secondary education as well. There were two motives: (1) Too many adolescents wandering the streets of cities without adequate employment was a recipe for trouble; (2) Industrializing economies required a higher degree of literacy and numeracy to staff the mass production, mass distribution, bureaucratized economic systems with obedient skilled factory, transportation, and office workers.

But the great majority of Black youth, especially in the South, were pushed towards other economic and political roles. They continued to work on farms, began to emigrate to Northern more industrialized places, or found themselves conscripted into peonage by mine-owners, steel manufacturers, railroad magnates, and prison farms. Again, it is worth quoting Anderson at length:

Whereas the majority, 54 percent, of southern white children of high school age were enrolled in public high schools by the mid-1930s, more than eight out of every ten black children of high school age were not enrolled in secondary schools…This pattern of southern black high school enrollment held through the 1930s. In 1940…only 23 percent of the black high school age population was enrolled in public secondary schools. In Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, states with large black populations, less than 18 percent of the black high school age population was enrolled in public secondary schools in 1940. For the nation as a whole and the white South, the elite public high school of the late nineteenth century was transformed into the “people’s college” during the first third of the twentieth century. For blacks in the South, the struggle to attain public high school for the majority of their high school age children would continue beyond the post-World War II era. While American youth in general were being pushed into public high schools, southern black youth, a sizable minority of black high school age children in America, were being locked out of the nation’s public high schools. This oppression of black schoolchildren during the critical stage of the transformation of American secondary educaiton seriously affected the long-term development of education in the black community and was one of the fundamental reasons that the educational progress of black Americans lagged far behind that of other Americans.

Decades too late, Part 1

We who see ourselves working for education as liberation have tried to expose the lie that says the American School creates equal opportunity, and we have tried to develop something different. (“American School”—always capitalized—as a name for the supremacist system is borrowed from Jarvis Givens’s Fugitive Pedagogy.) However, the details and historical patterns of how the lie has operated since Emancipation are generally not well understood. It is too simple to say, “The system is performing as intended. It keeps rich white people on top and poor people of color below.” That formulation captures an important truth, but also misses an opportunity to organize resistance. “The system” is an expression that hides a variety of convoluted knots that all need to be untangled. “The system” isn’t just school, or teachers, or curriculum, or education funding, or redlining, or job discrimination, or patriarchy, or the wealth gap. There’s a concrete way these different pieces have evolved historically, and if we analyze them together it’s possible to foresee some strategies that might cause a major shift for the better.

Here’s a summary analysis—though still pretty lengthy—that could be helpful. It’s broken into three separate blog posts. (Note: I center on Black students and communities because I have worked in Baltimore for 40 years. Similar stories could be told about other communities, but this summary focuses on the ones I know best.)

First, keep in mind that there are two partly parallel tracks in the story. One track is the education black people have arranged for themselves. Givens’s Fugitive Pedagogy is a great contemporary introduction to this strand. The other track is the education that White people have either originated or adapted and promoted as champions of black education over the years. James Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South: 1860-1935 gives many insights into both the first strand and into the early part of this other strand. The two tracks are sometimes completely separate, but they often interact and overlap in various ways, and it’s important to watch carefully if we want the complete picture.

Heather Williams in Self-taught, Givens, Anderson and many others have documented how even before Emancipation black people educated themselves. Free blacks established their own schools in many places across the country, but as much as ten percent of enslaved people found ways to acquire literacy, too. Immediately after Emancipation and while the Civil War was still going on, many formerly enslaved people rushed to learn to read. These attempts were both formal and informal: grabbing someone who knew how to read and asking them to teach you, but also setting up schools in barns, under trees, wherever you could. Erecting school buildings with virtually no money and finding a way to pay teachers were common post-war activities for black communities. Many White people hated this; hundreds of black schools were burnt down in the first decades after the Civil War. But black populations across the South clamored for a system of public education to be established, and they were partly supported during the brief period of Reconstruction by the Freedman’s Bureau—an early instance of the white- “assisted” track overlapping with the black track.

We must note that what “education” and “school” meant in the middle of the 19th century was very different from what they are typically taken to mean today. Black people initiated a call for education not directly for economic reasons, but for political and cultural reasons. The economic role of the great majority of the formerly enslaved was agricultural, just as it was for the majority of white people at the time. Most white children in the North received some elementary education in the three R’s, but poor Southern whites generally did not, and secondary education was practically non-existent except for the wealthy. The reason for this was that farming as a form of employment did not require high levels of education.

Black people demanding education post-war were seeking access to literacy and basic numeracy so as to participate fully in the life of the country: to read and write newspapers, to understand political questions including who to vote for, to read contracts, to not be hoodwinked in commercial transactions, to communicate and express themselves, and to gain full access to the almost magical power of written text as exemplified in the Bible, the law courts, histories, sciences, and literature.

Black demands for universal public education caused poor white people in the South to demand universal education for their own children as well, and this demand led to the first systems of public education outside of Northern cities. Except for a few locations in the North, schools were generally segregated, and here we should pay special attention to the way shifting economic roles resulted in concrete ideas about how the new education systems should be structured.

The basic shape of the American School developed in the latter half of the 19th century as a response to increasing urbanization and industrialization—but we are speaking here of education primarily for white children (including newly arrived immigrants whose racially segregated schools “taught” them that they were not black). Age-segregated classrooms (grade 1, 2, 3, and so on), standardized curriculum, testing by examination as a form of competition and quality control, numerical and letter grades reported for each student, centralized school boards, teacher certification—all developed during this period. These formal characteristics of a “democratic” education involving masses of children from the working classes had also begun to take shape in Europe at around the same time; but the American political system greatly intensified the push to feed every white child into a standard educational structure. Remember that in this period secondary education was restricted to a very small proportion of the white population because the employment available to the masses, even in industrializing cities, required only a little more learning than farm life did. The business and industrial overseers of the new education “system” did not intend for the mass of students to grow their humanity or follow their dreams. The principal function of the American School in the later 19th century was rather to create a disciplined, obedient workforce. Regimentation and standardization in school was designed to foster competition in conditions of scarcity and to ensure the docility of the working classes.

The great majority of Black children in the last part of the 19th century lived on farms, not in cities. They did not participate in these developments of the urban public schools except in certain pockets of major cities in the North. In fact, many Southern planters resisted black children’s attending school at all because they intended for children as well as adults to work at planting, weeding, and harvesting, and many black families acceded to these demands for reasons of economic survival. As late as 1930, according to one study, 74% of black students enrolled in Southern schools were attending grade 4 or lower.

Some problems of identity

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity is an intriguing and wise reflection on one of the crucial rhetorical and conceptual problems of the 21st century. Appiah takes a historical approach to the development of several versions of identity (class, creed, culture, country, color), but the historical approach is meant to reveal philosophical and rhetorical strands that we might otherwise miss.

The most important service of the book is to sharpen a conceptual problem: On one hand, there is widespread agreement among academic students of identity that most of the categories we in the 21st century name for ourselves are “socially constructed” rather than somehow “natural”. Generally (though not for everyone) it is accepted in universities and left-of-center publications that perceptions and language about race, gender, nationality, religion, and other intersecting categories are not caused by scientifically observable facts about the world, but are to a large extent effects of the way various societies come to perceive and speak through their historical interactions.

For example, according to this view (which I share), the idea of “race” emerged in the 17th century as a result of European investment in the African slave trade and the consequent apologeteics for holding property in human beings. Race, in this view, does not describe genetic differences. For example, we often hear that there is more genetic variation between people who are socially identified as being of the same race than there is between people who are said to be of differenet races. Not biology, but social “constructs” account for our perceiving and talking about Black people and White people, for example.

Much of Appiah’s book is about the historical origins of certain namings, and about the obvious absurdity of claiming that the names can be understood as indices pointing to something specific in the world. One of his most fun bits of historicizing is his deconstruction of the idea of the West, or Western civilization, or Western culture. At one time “West vs. East” referred to Europe and Asia. Sometimes people spoke and still speak of “Western” as Christian and “Eastern” as Muslim, Hindu, or Confucian, for example. But Western as Christian is now often enlarged to Western as Judeo-Christian and encompasses not just Europe, but Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and Israel, i.e., Europe’s White-dominated former colonies. The opposite of the “West” in this sense is the Global South, which makes no sense geographically, and which includes all of “Latin” America. Even neo-Nazis sometimes support Zionism as holding the line for Western culture against Arab, Asian, and African onslaughts—a bizarre racist example of the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In similar ahistorical fashion, the foundation of Western culture is often said to coincide with Plato and Aristotle, but the Greek philosophers were largely unknown to Europeans until the 13th century, while Islamic scholars in places like Baghdad and Alexandria read, translated, and absorbed Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid many centuries earlier. In fact, Europe learned about the Greeks mostly from African Muslims in occupied Spain as well as from “Eastern” scholars fleeing the collapse of the Byzantine Empire.

Appiah’s point is that to the extent that identities hinge on labels like Western, Christian, French, African, White or Asian, we should be clear that we are not on solid ground. Identities are unstable, negotiable, historically conditioned, not only socially determined, but socially indeterminate and eternally mutating.

On the other hand, identity labels are crucial political, social, and emotional tools that we cannot do without. Despite the fact that Black and White are categories invented by Europeans to justify a system of violent oppression, few African Americans today would willingly give up their identity as Black, their property in Black music and Black joy, their legacy in the Black struggle for freedom. Similarly, though many of us critique the patriarchal binaries of man/woman and want to leave the door open for the existence of all kinds of sexuality and desire, we protect and defend any individual’s right to claim a concrete identity for themself: “male,” “female,” “gay,” “bisexual,” and so on. Or take class: in the United States we have been taught since World War II to understand “class” as socially constructed. We are all taught to think of ourselves as “potentially rich”; there are no fixed classes, just unending upward and downward mobility, but with the general trend being upward, so that most of us usually think of ourselves as “middle class”, meaning at war neither with the rich, nor with the poor. But for those of us who believe capitalism is an evil system there is a clear political advantage to sharpen class identifications and class solidarity—that is, of the working class against the rich. Believing that I am “essentially” a worker can create a perspective and analysis that is more effective in organizing resistance to colonialism, exploitation, and violence. Identity categories may be human creations, slippery, and rife with contradiction, but they are nevertheless useful tools that we are loath to abandon when they serve a pragmatic purpose.

Appiah is sensitive to both sides of this coin—identities as illusory, and identies as deep realities of each person. What he promotes is an openness to flexibility and tolerance, a willingness to be comfortable in the middle of many identities, and in two senses: first, to be comfortable in the middle of people who have many different ways of identifying or labeling themselves; and second, to be comfortable as an ego in the middle of my own many identies, my own intersections, histories, and questions.

Appiah wisely points out that the majority of our identity labels today are leftovers from 19th and early 20th century theorizing of various kinds. He believes it is time that we advance our theorizing to fit better with historical developments which have changed many kinds of relationship and so many feelings about identity. In one of the most beautiful stories in the book, Appiah describes the career of a person named Amo taken in 1707 as a five-year-old child from the town of Axim in what is now Ghana to Wofenbüttel in what is now Germany. Amo, called Anton Ulrich, eventually studied at the University of Wittenberg, became a renowned professor of philosophy, proficient in law, theology, medicine and astronomy, and was fluent in Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew and German. In 1747, however, at the age of 40, Amo decided to return to the villages of his birth, near Axim on the coast of West Africa. He never returned to Europe, nor did he leave any record of his reasoning, but Appiah notes: “It’s impossible not to wonder whether his was a flight from color consciousness, a retreat to a place where he would not be defined by his complexion…Indeed, his odyssey asks us to imagine what he seems to have yearned for: a world free of racial fixations. It asks if we could ever create a world where color is merely a fact, not a feature and not a fate. It asks if we might not be better off if we managed to give up our racial typologies, abandoning a mistaken way of thinking that took off at just about the moment when Anton Wilhem Amo was a well-iknown German philosopher at the height of his intellectual powers” (p. 134).

Can we imagine this? I think it’s an open question whether most of us even want to. Each of us has a great deal to lose.

Jarvis Givens and Vanessa Siddle Walker

Reading side-by-side two similarly spirited but very different histories of Black educational strategies in the 20th century raises fascinating questions about strategies for today.

Vanessa Siddle Walker’s The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools (The New Press, 2018) centers on the century-long practice of misdirection executed by leaders of the all-Black Georgia Teachers and Education Association (GT&EA). Through a succession of GT&EA leaders in the midst of JIm Crow, a strategy was pursued to improve education for Black children while concealing the motivating role of Black teachers and school administrators in the organizing and tactical maneuvering for justice. The story of how Prof. Siddle Walker got access to the materials for her book is itself a part of her subject and both introduces and complicates the trickster theme that she is exploring in her “historical ethnography,” as she calls it. Spending three days a week for two years with Dr. Tate, the last president of the GT&EA, Siddle Walker explains that it was only after she “had passed [Prof. and Mrs. Virginia Tate’s] ‘test’ for inquisitive researchers” that she was allowed to see volumes of materials stored in the Tates’ basement. Siddle Walker tell this part of the story in the introduction to her book, but only the patient reader hears the rest of the story in her epilogue. After Dr. Tate passed away in 2002, Siddle Walker finally follows up on his hint to go back to the old headquarters of the GT&EA in Atlanta, where she discovers eleven steel filing cabinets filled with additional records in a hidden attic.

We are meant to understand Dr. Tate’s wiliness, caution and indirection as part and parcel of the broader strategy to control not one but at least two narratives. In particular, there is the narrative “blandly accepted…that most historical accounts wrote and most readers affirmed”: “the NAACP protested injustice and crafted the successful Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that was supposed to deliver black children from poor schools to new opportunities. Grassroots movements of citizens tired of injustice erupted after Brown and demanded that America deliver on its promises of equality. The memory—of brilliant attorneys, courageous ministers, and a handful of private citizens who protested injustice as plaintiffs or through civil disobedience—remains seared in America’s collective consciousness.”

Siddle Walker notes that “the black educators about whom I write are also implicated in the dominance of [this] popular story. For most of their years of professional activities, black educators intentionally told the part of the story they wanted the public to know. It was intentional because it allowed them to gain the legal decisions and federal funding desired. The truth is, black educators did such a good job teaching the public the official script that most people never questioned those accounts. Historians cannot fully be blamed for that craftiness” (275).

The second narrative, concealed by these educators, has two parts. The first part tells the story of the “hidden world of courageous black educational leaders” who “created networks of advocacy that mirrored the networks created by the white educational associations in which they were denied membership…Necessarily invisible to prying eyes, black educators provided the plaintiffs, money, and data for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to generate the education cases…The bottom-to-top functioning of these networks allowed local parents to access nationally known attorneys to litigate their school-related grievances. Local NAACP chapters often provided the shield by lending their names, since they were already highly visible advocates who had enough distance from schools to lessen the concerns about retaliation by those who were determined to maintain the status quo.”

The second part of the hidden narrative tells how black educators “stimulated a vision to demand equal rights in an unequal America…they crafted forms of purposeful education that infused black schools with a civic and literary curriculum” through which “[g]enerations of students were quietly taught how to recognize they were being denied their rights and [were] armed with the resilience to believe they did not have to be diminished by America’s perverse form of ‘justice for all’ [laying] the groundwork for subsequent generations to demand equality” (11).

Siddle Walker’s underlying point is that “black educators could not always publicly discuss what they were actually working toward…Instead, [they] used their organizations to mask their activities.” She refers to Brer Rabbit as the “West African trickster figure who’d survived the MIddle Passage” and was now deployed strategically by these wily educators. “Much of Negro behavior,” she cites Robert Moton [/efnnote} Second president of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute [/efnnote] as saying, “was ‘nothing more’ than the Negro’s ‘artful and adroit accommodation of his manners and methods to what he knows to be the weaknesses and foibles of his white neighbor.’” “Had I not had access to Dr. Tate,” Siddle Walker emphasizes, “I would not have thought to look for these educators who employed a visible network to operate secret strategies utilized by every generation from Reconstruction to desegregation” (11-12).

Siddle Walker’s extremely detailed account of the complications involved in these strategies emerges from her methodology of “historical ethnography” which she has described in earlier books and outlines again here in an Author’s Note. She tries to describe from the inside out the experience of furtive car trips at night designed to shield parents from retribution for organizing against unequal schools, or the advice that Dr. Tate received as an undergraduate when he served as driver for his college’s president, Horace Mann Bond, father of Julian Bond (who would later become famous in SNCC). She recreates the intense, high-stakes debates about how much to ask for, when to demand rather than ask, how to get into the rooms where White people exercise power, how to desseminate information to different constituencies without endangering livlihoods or lives.

But the climax of The Lost Education of Horace Tate is the painful explication of the process by which the segregated but powerful Georgia Teachers and Education Association became merged in the 1970s with the previously all-White National Education Association’s (NEA) Georgia branch. The story is painful because Tate and others were aware of the loss that integration would represent. Already, hundreds of Georgia schools and thousands of schools across the country had experienced “outergration,” the process by which expert Black teachers and administrators lost their jobs to less qualified Whites and by which at least hundreds of Black communities lost their schools altogether, seeing the students in them bussed away and the schools shuttered forever. Siddle Walker reports extensively on Tate’s appeal to the GT&EA arguing against “second-class integration,” urging his colleagues to vote against merger. The speech is immensely powerful and moving. For example:

“Second class integration . . . is more evil than was segregation...because second class integration has a way of striking at the psych[e] and penetrating the fibers of the brain and depths of the soul to say to a person who has been deprived for over 400 years, 'I will make you think you are equal by passing laws to protect you and your rights, and after I have enacted those laws I will creep in on you. I will creep in on you and make you think you are somebody and make it legal for you to eat at the forbidden lunch counters and then I will creep a little further and take away your jobs so you wouldn't have money in which to buy the food.'...Second class integration has a way of saying 'I will creep in on you and surprise you and make you say "Yes sir" and "Yes ma'am" when you are buying items from my store, but I will creep a little further and charge you 25 cents more than the item is worth. I will let you listen to me tell you that you are equal but I will take away your control; I will take away your power; I will take away your influence; and I will take away your job. But I will tell you that you are equal and integrated.' There can be no first class citizenship with second class integration” (p. 261).

Tate’s speech was prophetic, and as we look around at the landscape of second class integration that surrounds our schools, neighborhoods, economic arrangements, and politics today, we can only wonder what would be different if the magnificently organized teachers’ associations that existed across the South had retained their segregated independence. The GT&EA ignored Dr. Tate’s warnings, and merged with the Georgia Educaiton Association, hoping that by allying with the more powerful and much wealthier White dominated teachers’ union that they could preserve some authority and some employment—a compromise, and, as things turned out, not a good one, at least not from the point of view of creating a true, egalitarian democracy.

Jarvis Givens’s Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching tells a very different story, though its themes are in many ways similar to Siddle Walker’s. Givens describes Woodson keynoting a GT&EA convention in 1942, inspiring the 2500 members to crowd out the Spellman College chapel “standing on chairs outside and leaning into the windows.” But with this one exception there is no cross reference between Woodson’s orbit and Tate’s in either book. Neither Woodson nor his organization, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) is mentioned at all by Siddle Walker.

The principle contrast between Tate’s story as told by Siddle Walker and Woodson’s story as told by Givens is that Tate attempted to collaborate with White power structures and Woodson operated as independently of them as he could. Givens’s account focuses on the second hidden narrative of Siddle Walker’s” “[g]enerations of students were quietly taught how to recognize they were being denied their rights and [were] armed with the resilience to believe they did not have to be diminished.” This teaching and arming was the purpose of Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH). Woodson did not seek integration or patronage from White institutions. He was never invited to speak at any predominantly White college or university. As Givens puts it, Woodson “engaged teachers through pathways beyond educational spheres controlled by white officials and philanthropists. They offered guidance that infused teachers’ pedagogy with politics and ideas emanating from the black counterpublic sphere” (p. 161).

This is a very different approach from the publicly accommodating but privately subversive role Siddle Walker describes as underlying Horace Tate’s career. The point is not that Tate was always accommodating. Far from it. His house is set on fire, he loses his job when he speaks out aginst the racist school board policies, he attempts to demand what his students need. But his work is constrained by the power dyanmics of the economic, political and cultural structures that he and his colleagues work within: what Givens refers to as the American School. For Siddle Walker, what Horace Tate teaches us is how much secret resistance was possible while still surviving economically within the dominant educational structures.

Givens emphasizes, in contrast, not so much hidden or secret resistance as what he calls “fugitive” pedagogy. Woodson “adovcated for black schools to ‘abandon a large portion of the traditional courses which have been retained throughout the years because they are supposedly cultural’” (p. 115). “Any educational program in service to black freedom dreams,” he writes, “needed to have, at its core, a social analysis of the world and new language that demystified how ideas in the American Curriculum—or colonial curricula—worked to sustain one’s subjection” (119).

Although Woodson and others emphatically taught the history of African Americans’ learning in secrecy when White supremacy made Black learning dangerous to do in the open, Woodson himself was bold and public about his own teaching. He published enormous amounts of explicitly pro-Black materials over many decades. His conception of Negro History Week was only one of the avenues he pursued to bring the political content of freedom work out of the shadows. He also wrote and disseminated textbooks that taught about Black rebellion and resistance. He mass produced and distributed posters and art for schools, classrooms, and churches that promoted images of Black power and strength. Through the vehicle of the Negro History Bulletin, Woodson stimulated research and publication on historical and cultural topics that openly contested the dominant narrative.

I think Givens could have been a little more explicit about the contrast between Woodson’s boldness and the kind of courageous but more deliberately disguised strategy of Horace Tate and others. Givens clearly explicates the “function of antiblackness in the American School” (always capitalized) and describes the resistance to antiblackness in education as, in fact, resistance to American School. Integration was in no way a goal of Woodson’s, at least not in any short run. The project of the ASNLH was to establish an independent Black consciousness through the knowledge and celebration of Black history.

In case we miss the point, Givens includes a wonderful chapter that connects anti-colonialist writings outside of the U.S. to Woodson’s project. Sylvia Wynter of Jamaica, Ngugi wa Thiong’o of Kenya, and Aimé Césaire of Martinique are invoked as related practioners of anti-colonial educational strategies. Césaire, for example writes that “wherever there are colonizers and colonized face to face, I see…in a parody of education, the hasty manufacture of a few thousand subordinate functionaries, ‘boys,’ artisans, clerks, and interpreters necessary for the smooth operation of business” (Givens, p. 118)

In schools where there is no critique of capitalism, imperialism, racism, patriarchy, and violence, doesn’t Givens’s perspective imply that School necessarily produces this parody of education? The pathos of Horace Tate’s story is that despite his heroic persistence and cunning, schools for Black children are still thoroughly segregated by caste, and the power of Black teachers and communities—once concentrated through efforts like those of the GT&EA—are now dissipated, diffused, and compromised. The standard, consensus policy of virtually every education agency at the local, state, and federal levels is indeed to hastily manufacture the subordinate functionaaries, clerks, and interpreters neccessary for the smooth operation of business. What a different education system it would be if the goal was freedom, relationship, and democratic power.

I don’t know by what measures we could or should compare the efforts of Woodson and Césaire, for example, to Tate’s efforts, but Givens’s and Siddle Walker’s books together make me think that we should be aware that choices have to be made. We can choose to be more or less open in our resistence to the smooth operation of business. Different choices may need to be made in different circumstances. But we do no one any good if we pretend that we can play both sides. And we should teach the generations who must take over this struggle that they must choose, too, both whose side they are on, and whether they will fight openly or in camouflage.

Robert O'Meally on the Vernacular in Ellison and Burke

Robert O’Meally has an outstanding chapter in History and Memory in African American Culture (Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally, eds., [Oxford, 1994]) called "On Burke and the Vernacular: Ralph Ellison's Boomerang of History.”

The Burke-Ellison relationship is still much too little known despite the excellent book by Brian Crable, Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke: At the Roots of the Racial Divide (University of Virginia, 2012). I was at a Burke conference once where his son (I think Michael) told of sitting on the floor in the Burkes’ New Jersey farmhouse circa 1951 (a teenager, maybe), listening to Ellison on the piano bench reading manuscript chapters of Invisible Man to his mentor, Burke.

O’Meally’s chapter centers on Ellison’s promotion of an African American practice related to history as more than what is written down in books. Various vernaculars—of music, art, gesture, clothing, and speech—contribute to strategies for learning from the past in order to cope with the present. O’Meally begins with this miraculous citation from Ellison’s essay, “Going to the Territory”:

Perhaps if we learn more of what has happened and why it happened, we'll learn more of who we really are. And perhaps if we learn more about our unwritten history, we won't be so vulnerable to the capriciousness of events as we are today. And in the process of becoming more aware of ourselves we will recognize that one of the functions of our vernacular culture is that of preparing for the emergence of the unexpected, whether it takes the form of the disastrous or the marvelous.

Ellison’s essay was first published in 1980. I can’t help hearing the echo in this passage of a now fairly well-known quotation from Ella Baker which I know of as the epigraph to both Barbara Ransby’s biography, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (2003) and to my teacher Robert Moses’s Radical Equations, which he co-wrote with Charles Cobb (2001). I don’t know when Baker actually spoke these words or whether there might have been some common source for the strikingly similar phrasing and sense:

In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning—getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system. That is easier said than done. But one of the things that has to be faced is, in the process of wanting to change that system, how much have we got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going….I am saying as you must say, too, that in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but we must understand where we have been.

—Ella Baker

As O’Meally describes carefully throughout his essay on the vernacular, the core of the relationship between Burke and Ellison is their shared commitment to action. For both, writing is action; writing does something for the writer, accomplishes some change. But also, writing is preparation for action just as much as the infielder’s or wrestler’s crouch are more than mere formalities. They position you to be able to do things you couldn’t do otherwise, to spring in one direction or another, at one velocity or another, in a way yet to be determined, because future circumstances are always indeterminate.

Bob Moses and Ella Baker were more explicit political actors than Ellison and Burke; they were organizers who created and supported grassroots campaigns and structures over many decades to model and demand change in the larger society. But they took a long view of action and shared Ellison’s and Burke’s understanding of vernacular forms as strategies to prepare for action, strategies that could not be skipped over if you wanted your action to succeed. I interpret Baker’s distinction between remembering where we have been and understanding where we have been as partly a distinction between what can be written down in the history books and what can only be learned from listening to the elders’ oral traditions, hearing how they talk, and watching how they move.

Writing and reading create opportunities for us to tense our muscles in certain ways, or to relax them in other ways, to direct our attention, or to extend our peripheral vision, to sharpen other senses or to become familiar with particular patterns, tones of voice, nuance, that, if we notice them in time, might save us significant pain or bring us significant joy in the future.

Of course, the point of this chapter is that it isn’t only the written word that helps us prepare in this way. All the modes of the vernacular—music, visual arts, food, dance, clothing, and on and on—contribute to our preparation, each with its own special enhancement of our “equipment for living,” as Burke calls it.

Ellison emphasizes the unpredictable, “the unexpected, whether it takes the form of the disastrous or the marvelous.” Creativity is more than an algorithm derived from massive amounts of historical data. “Preparing for the emergence of the unexpected” requires incipient responses, “attitudes” Burke would say, that can become full-blown actions as the ball suddenly comes off the bat. Thinking that history is linear or even a spiral, O’Meally points out, is something Ellison’s Invisible Man warned against: you are “preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy.”

The arbitrary cruelty and violence that Africans have faced at the hands of Europeans has certainly taught that historical progress is no sure bet. Learning to prepare for the arbitrary, the contingent, the spiteful, the perverted whims or greed or violence of others must be very different from learning to prepare for living in some sensible, collaborative order. But it is the first type of learning that African Americans have been obliged to acquire. There is an aspect to all learning that is a continuation of the past, but O’Meally makes the point that “U.S. black vernacular forms, as conservative as they can be, also are fueled by an aggressive impulse to change, not only ‘to make it new’ but to make what they do uncopyably different…Perhaps in part it is this impulse for survival by means of creating cultural forms that ‘the white boys can’t steal’ that accounts for so much of the African American’s sustained centuries of creativity on these shores.”

Our work in the Algebra Project, following the Black freedom fighters Bob Moses, and Ella Baker, is to try to understand how a vernacular mathematics can develop among young people. Their stances, their muscular and aesthetic postures, change daily in response to innovations in dance, music, language, fashion, styles of all sorts. But in relation to mathematics, young people of all cultures and races have mostly been taught to be stiff, awkard, and inflexible. We math teachers hear over and over that our students (and their parents) just want us to show them exactly what the problem is going to look like on the test and to show them exactly the “steps” they need to solve the problem. It is thought to be some new-fangled, fancified invention with no connection to “the real world” when a teacher either poses a problem that can’t be solved with some short list of “steps” or refuses to reveal the “steps” and wants the students to discover mathematical truths for themselves. They—the students and their parents—are left unprepared for mathematical living. They don’t know how to get into a crouch to prepare for mathematics coming their way and they have very little equipment for dealing with anything even remotely unexpected when it has to do with numbers.

I think it is mostly sad when good-hearted teachers say something like, “I always try to rephrase math problems in terms of money, because my students ‘get’ money and so it makes the math easier” (I confess I do this myself sometimes). We intend to relate math to “real life,” and try to “meet the students where they are” which is unobjectionable as far as it goes. But the mathematical operations our students do with money are very limited in variety, more and more limited, in fact, as they make almost all purchases now electronically, not even counting actual cash or coin. We decide in effect to exchange a hardball mathematical question for a softball or even a bean bag, as though we were playing catch with a three-year-old—patronizingly trading the question that is giving them trouble for a question in terms of money, which we think they “understand.” One of Bob Moses’s favorite questions for 6th through 9th graders to grapple with is “Why is it true that a - b = a + (-b)?” He was not interested in translating this question into terms of money (though he would certainly have been interested to hear how a student might try such a translation). Bob only posed this question after the students had gone through months of experiences, discussions, representations of their experience, and so on till they finally arrived at an abstraction like the one above. The idea was that they created mathematics from their experience as opposed to having mathematics converted into some practice of repetition of what is already (supposedly) given and known, such as how money works.

Math is a creative human activity for dealing with what life throws at us, not different in kind from art, dance, carpentry, cooking, or any other thing people do to thrive. There are vernacular forms of math, just as their are vernacular forms of those other kinds of human activity. Ellison defines the vernacular as “a dynamic process in which the most refined styles from the past are continually merged with the play-it-by-eye-and-by-ear improvisations which we invent in our efforts to control our environment and entertain ourselves.” It isn’t a question of “what’s in the textbook” or “the teacher’s way” vs. “a different way to solve the problem”. We are talking about something much different from a problem set. We are talking about where math comes from and what it is for—partly to “control our environment” and partly to “entertain ourselves.” Many powerful and beautiful mathematical insights have been written down in textbooks, that is true. But they are far from the last word and they can be rediscovered or reinvented in the right circumstances, and the way they apply to “the real world” certainly exceeds anyone’s imagination because the future is so unpredictable. A vernacular mathematics in Ellison’s sense of vernacular merges the most refined styles of mathematics with the improvisations we need for our lives today in the here and now. So it is not a question of textbooks vs. some other thing, just as jazz improvisation is not contrary to written music or classical theory but incorporates and extends their principles for the musicians’ purposes.

The relation of oral history and teaching to written history and book learning is related to this question of the vernacular, but isn’t a straightforward parallel. We’ll leave that for another day.

Reading and Math "Wars"--What is at stake?

Two recent media treatments about the blessings of the “science of reading” and the horrors of “unscientific” reading instruction (targeted at Lucy Calkins) tread the same muddy water and are unlikely to result in more children learning to read. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/opinion/reading-kids-phonics.html, https://revealnews.org/podcast/how-teaching-kids-to-read-went-so-wrong/

My friend, Laura Roop, points out that the polemics around reading have much to do with market share and branding. “Science of Reading” is an investment category as is Lucy Calkins’s “Units of Study” and others. But there are also political motivations that are less immediately about money.

It helps to think about the controversy over how to teach reading in tandem with controversies over how to teach math if we want to get down to “root causes”.

First, notice that there is a straw man in both controversies. In reading, the proponents of what is called “science,” “brain science,” and more popularly, “phonics,” pretend that the other side of the controversy eschews “phonics” altogether. For example, Kristof writes in his recent article: “we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.” No one who studies reading seriously believes that kids don’t need to learn how letters represent sounds (at least in languages that use alphabetic writing systems). Those of us who distrust “science of reading” pretensions simply point out that reading English involves much more than “phonics”. But no one who studies reading seriously disagrees that “more than phonics” is crucial, too. So focusing on “phonics” is a straw man argument, and doesn’t help us understand what is really at stake.

I put “phonics” in quotation marks because it is a term that isn’t used by linguists and doesn’t describe anything very specific in English. The spelling of English words (unlike Spanish or Italian, for instance) depends not only on letter-sound correspondences but also on the meaning of words. David and Sharon Reinking have an excellent article on the subject: “Why Teaching Phonics (in English) is Difficult to Teach, Learn, and Apply”. They point out that there are no expensive government studies, no reading wars or even controversies about how to teach reading in Italy, because Italian matches letters to sounds in a straigtforward way. In English, however, “health” and “heal” are related morphologically—by meaning. But the “ea” in “health” is pronounced differently from the “ea” in “heal”. Sounding out “healthy” would get you “heal-thee” or “heal-thigh”. There are tens of thousands of similar examples.

Because of this fact, every knowledgeable reading expert knows that children learn to read “health” or “healthy” correctly by realizing that they can’t just “sound it out.” They learn to pay attention to the meaning of what they’re reading, and their brains get used to taking in bigger chunks of text (mostly to the right of the letter or word they’re “on”), and from practice they get the idea that when they see the “th” after “heal”, what would get sounded out as “heel” actually gets pronounced as “health”, whereas when they see “ing” after “heal”, they were right the first time and go ahead with something that sounds like “heeling.” As they get good at reading, which is much more than “decoding” one sound at a time, these processes of incoporating semantic and syntactic context and taking in wider swathes of text ahead of the word they’re sounding out become automatic. They’re fluent readers. A new, odd word out of context makes us all hesitant decoders (try “autochthonous”, for example), but that hesitancy doesn’t mean we don’t know how to read.

Proponents of “systematic phonics” tend to ignore the fact that a complete list of all the rules and exceptions in English would run to thousands of pages. It isn’t even true that there are “basic phonics rules” that work for beginning readers, because a high percentage of the most common words in English have weird spellings (“go” vs. “to”; “come” vs. “home”; “they” vs. “eye”; and on and on). No, the rhetorical purpose of people who like to say “phonics” is to pretend that something simple and basic would make learning to read a snap, and that it’s fancy people with fancy theories that are making reading difficult for normal kids. But it’s just not so. Reading English is tricky.

The straw man is conjured at just this point in the argument by “phonics” people accusing stubborn people like me of not wanting to teach phonics at all. But that’s not so either. Of course, we need to teach how letters correspond to sounds as much as we possibly can and as much as makes sense, because we use an alphabetic writing system. But we also need to do more to help new readers see that “sounding out” is a good place to start, but reading is about communicating and understanding, not simply about pronouncing. In fact, if you try to just pronounce, you’re going to end up not understanding.

As the Reinkings put it: “Anyone helping children use phonics in English needs to be aware of and appreciate its complexity and difficulty. That means not assuming nor giving children the impression that sounding out words by individual letters or letter combinations is foolproof decoding, nor the essence of reading.” They go on to give excellent examples of the “concessions” that need to be made to the complexity of phonics in English. For example, “Putting all your eggs in the phonics basket is not likely to be entirely effective or efficient. Other approaches and strategies might, and often do, fill the gap by supplementing phonics.” Or: “A consequence of phonics’ complexity…is a heightened need for professional judgement and flexibility. Much like a good doctor who will vary treatments and dosages for individual patients, teachers need to merge deep knowledge of phonics and their students with their professional experience to make wise decisions.” The Reinkings and many others go into more detail about what specific supplemental strategies could help and about how good reading teachers pay attention to the things particular students need—directing their attention to a certain phonics issue, or making them less stressed, or appealing to their interests, and on and on.

The point is that reading isn’t simple, but everyone can learn to do it well. The issue being debated isn’t “phonics.” The issue being debated is the bigger subject that we all agree is our goal: how to teach reading. “Phonics” does not solve the problem; it is only a part of the solution. And honestly, almost no one in the reading education field disagrees with this point.

Similarly with the “math wars.” Here the straw man is the idea that left-leaning or constructivist math teachers and math education professors somehow think that students don’t need to learn how to multiply and divide. The accusers get this idea from our reluctance to introduce concepts to young people through hard-and-fast rules and algorithms. For example, there’s supposed to be something tough-minded and serious about teaching the usual algorithm for addition: line up the columns; start at the right-most column; add the numbers in the column; “carry” the “tens digit” to the next column to the left; add the next column; and so on. Of course, that’s a silly method if your problem is 199 + 1, for example. However, there are times when I find myself using that usual algorithm. The point is not that the algorithm is useless in all cases.

The point is that the algorithm only makes sense if you understand place value in our notation system. But if you understand place value in our notation system, then you often don’t need to bother with the algorithms.

One way I decide how comfortable a student is with place value and our notation system (at pretty much any age over 8) is to see how they do a simple arithmetic problem like adding a bunch of two or three digit numbers, or multiplying or dividing some two or three digit numbers (if the question happens to come up). A student who starts to lay out 200 x 47 by lining up the columns and multiplying 7 x 0, writing down “0”, etc., shows me off the bat that they’re not quite sure what’s going on. Of course, they say that that’s how their teacher showed them to do it. I’m sure they’re right. It’s just not what people do if they understand that the columns represent increasing powers of 10 or that multiplying by two means “doubling”, or that 47 is almost 50. Someone who understands those things says, maybe, “100 x 47 is 4700” (because that’s what multiplying by 100 means in our notation), and then 200 x 47 is 100 x (47 + 47) (because multiplying by 2 means doubling), and 50 + 50 is 100 so 47 + 47 is 94 (because 47 is 3 less than 50, and the other 47 is 3 less than 50, so together they’re 6 less than 100 or 94). All in all, 200 x 47 is 9400.”

Many children from 4th grade on who have had small class sizes and well-trained constructivist teachers do something like this very quickly in their heads. They aren’t any more brilliant than anyone else. They just aren’t handicapped by the algorithms.

I completely understand that many people reading descriptions like the above claim that it’s completely confusing, way too complicated, little kids can’t understand that, and much more. But this is just because many people reading descriptions like the above have never seen how small children do actually develop this kind of mathematical reasoning in ways very similar to how they develop language skills, as long as they aren’t stymied by poor teaching or large class sizes or both.

So it isn’t that we leftists don’t want children to learn to multiply and divide. That’s a straw man. We want children to learn to understand multiplication and division, addition and subtraction, fractions, equations and much, much more in ways that allow them to build the more complicated mental representations that they need in order to master advanced mathematics later on. We don’t want them to learn meaningless manipulations of numbers in columns that get marked correct or incorrect on a worksheet because those meaningless manipulations prevent them from developing the complex mental representaitons of mathematical objects (like functions, slopes, derivatives, ratios, and vectors, for example) that they need to fully participate in 21st century science, business, and, in fact, citizenship.

The straw men that certain participants in the reading and math wars try to shoot down are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface is the much bigger problem of the way education works in complex 21st century societies. In one sense, education is never problematic: human beings instinctively organize ourselves to help children grow up into the society they live in. Today what that looks like in America is that the schools for high caste children help them grow up to be in command, to expect that they will be in command, to believe that there are solutions to most problems if you are willing to spend the time and money to solve them. Children in families that are struggling but middle class generally go to schools that help them learn to strive hard but also accept that everything in life isn’t fair; there are winners and losers, and if you lose, it’s usually because you lack the grit or talent to win. And schools for children in the caste of surplus labor, the historically disenfranchised caste, teach that you are probably wild, ignorant, and out of control unless the authorities use very strict and harsh policies to keep you and your peers in your place; you should expect little to nothing from society; and you should remember that the few people who come from your caste and are accepted (at least temporarily) into the higher castes are proof that the problem of your own status arises from your inadequacy, not because of any systemic social structures.

The reading and math wars are symptomatic of our general unwillingness to confess that education is working just fine as an institution of cultural transmission. Part of the dominant ideology requires a belief in education as opportunity—opportunity to “reach your dreams.” The hard evidence of at least the last 70 years (since Brown v. Board) is that greater attention to and investment in education has not resulted in amelioration of the country’s caste structure for those in the lower castes. This is because education works as opportunity only for those castes that are seen as worthy to enjoy what the society has to offer. For those castes which are seen as unworthy, education is not opportunity; education for those castes is training in how to accept subordinate roles.

Our unwillingness to acknowledge this truth about the different role for education in different caste settings produces frustration in the policy-making class—a frustration that is reflected, though for different reasons , in the places where people are most oppressed. The policy-makers are frustrated because their self-regard is tied to the idea that they are not power-hungry and racist; they see themselves as generous and enlightened. Evidence of widespread poverty and despair threatens the view they have of their own goodness. Families, on the other hand, who live in poverty do put hope in the next generations. They do believe that education should be opportunity, and they are frustrated that the schools for their children are so ineffective in creating the literacies of the 21st century. The schools either say they and their children are at fault and are not doing well academically, or they say that their children are doing great, until the children graduate from high school and it turns out they aren’t qualified for any kind of employment beyond very menial work.

A simple “solution” is therefore attractive to many people: School should “go back” to teaching phonics and simple arithmetic. All children will then get started on an equal footing and caste disparities will be ameliorated. But learning to read is in fact more complicated than a phonics workbook, and learning math is more complicated than the standard addition and subtraction algorithms. We who believe in freedom must devise methods to demonstrate how the actual complexity of 21st century literacies ineed not be a barrier to learning in oppressed communities, but is a huge opportunity for attacking and changing the status quo.

Staughton Lynd and non-institutional organizing

A wonderful little book, The Essential Staughton Lynd, edited by Walter Howard, focuses attention on Staughton and Alice Lynd’s non-conformist unusual, intensely vibrant insights towards non-institutional organizing. The first of five short pieces in the book describes four “epiphanies”. Each points to an aspect of non-institutional organizing.

By “non-institutional organizing” I mean organizing that does not intend to create or result in any particular institution as a permanent vehicle for addressing injustice. The idea is best described by Lynd’s examples.

1. In the American Revolution, some working class people (including some enslaved people), sided with the British; others sided with the revolutionaries. Lynd’s point is that working class people evaluated their alliances based on who was against the landowners or in their particular circumstances. “Whichever side your landlord supported, you chose the other side.” They weren’t invested in an ideal of independence from the King, or allegiance to the King. They were invested in getting out from under the thumb of someone immediate and known.

2. The demise of SNCC. Lynd’s analysis is that SNCC’s power and successes came from living and learning side by side with sharecroppers and domestic workers in Mississippi and Alabama. But SNCC had a model of organizing (which Lynd ascribes also to Saul Alinsky—despite many differences) whereby organizers intentionally moved into a contested area for only limited periods, averaging maybe two years. This was true in the Mississippi Delta and in Lowndes County, Alabama, for example. They intended to build a local organization. Then they left the local organiztaion to struggle on its own. Lynd believes this is short-sighted. He believes the right organizing model is to move in and stay put. He references here, as in many of his other writings, Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero’s notion of “accompaniement”, which must be sustained for a much longer time.

3. Fascinating examples from labor history whereby “winning a contract” as an accomplishment of an established union is less useful and much less empowering than flexibly responding to unacceptable working conditions, wages, etc., on an ad hoc basis without a contract. Lynd points out that “a comprehensive collective bargaining agreement, assumed by today’s labor historians and union leaders to be self-evidently desirable, and which I too took for granted” is often an obstacle because it can constrain workers from immediately organizing at the shop floor level for whatever they need in the moment, and using whatever strategies or tactics they find most empowering.

4. “The relationship of trust” that developed between the Lucasville Five, sentenced to death for murder allegedly committed during a prison uprsing in Ohio in 1993. Staughton and Alice worked for decades to bring justice to the Five, and Staughton teaches that huge reservoirs of unexpected resources open up from detailed listening to people who have almost unthinkably bare resources for institution building; the prisoners were for years restricted to solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. But through gathering their stories, the Lynds were able to force courts to impose conditions on the use of such confinement, even in the cases of the “worst of the worst” as they are called.

These examples collectively teach a lesson about youth organizing and education. Young people’s allegiances are not necessarily institutional, and the more alientated they are, the less they are likely to find insitutions that meet their needs. Therefore, they must be listened to—but not listened to so that “their voices are heard,” though of course it’s important for young people to feel that they are heard. Rather, they must be listened to so that we can help arrange or leverage structures that allow them to mobilize power. And this work must take place over a very long time, so that the lessons of those mobilizations can accrue and beome grounded in the culture of the people.