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.