Aaron Regunberg: History and Education Reform
Friday, October 21, 2011
In the summer of 1831, an enslaved black man in Virginia named Nat Turner led a number of fellow slaves in an armed insurrection, traveling from plantation to plantation to free other blacks and attack white slaveowners. Around fifty white Virginians were killed before a massive military mobilization by the state crushed the uprising. Militias executed most of the slaves involved, and white mobs across Virginia murdered hundreds more.
But panic had already spread through the South’s white population. In Virginia, the fear was so great that the Virginia General Assembly actually began to debate whether the institution of slavery had become so excessively dangerous to the security of whites that ithad to be abolished.
This proposition, of course, represented too great a threat to the economic interests of Virginia’s slaveowning elites. Instead, a different approach was chosen, one that led the Virginia General Assembly to pass two new sets of laws: the first, and more well-known, made it illegal for any white person to teach any black person to read or write; the second, which we rarely hear about, mandated that every slaveowner provide for the ‘moral education’ of his slaves by bringing in white ministers to instill in them the lessons of submission and docility.
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It’s important to note that the slaveowning elites’ answer to this act of rebellion was not simply to stop slaves from receiving any education at all. Rather, they wanted enslaved blacks to receive a particular kind of education—one that taught them to look up to white culture and society and down on their own heritage, that convinced them that the economicand political system in which they labored was just and fair, and that instilled in them the values of obedience and compliance and rooted out those of independence and critical questioning.
Those of us involved in the current education reform debate in America should see some disturbing similarities between Southern slaveowners’ response to Nat Turner’s Rebellion and the educational landscape we find ourselves in today. Over the past decade, economic and political elites in our country have taken a renewed interest in education. But before all us New York Times-reading liberals get overly excited by this development, we shouldheed the story of antebellum Virginia and ask ourselves an important question—what kind of education is being forced onto America’s most marginalized youth?
The answer is not, in my opinion, very heartening. National elites (conservatives and liberals alike) have set up standardized tests as the raison d’etre for education. They’ve created a policy landscape that makes standardized test scores the foundation on which students, teachers, and schools are evaluated, thereby ensuring that the most relevant goal at every level of the education system is to raise these scores.
Under this system, ‘education’has been reduced to the incredibly narrow definition of whether or not students can regurgitate a very limited set of facts, understandings, and ideas—facts, understandings, and ideas that are dictated by the political and economic elites who write our standardized tests. Just as slaveowning white men mandated the values and limited skills that enslaved blacks were to be taught after Nat Turner’s Rebellion, so today do our nation’s elites mandate the values and limited skills that students need to learn to graduate from high school, that teachers need to teach to keep their jobs, that schools need to focus on to maintain their autonomy, and that states need to emphasize to receive federal funding.
System Doesn’t Emphasize Critical Thinking
What are these values and limited skills? Visit a ‘no-excuse’ charter school like Blackstone Valley Prep, which has its elementary school students take standardized tests at the end of every class period every single day, or Achievement First, which has been accused of public humiliation and shunning to instill obedience in its young people. Talk to a teacher who has abandoned project-based learning in order to teach to the test, or take a few minutes to page through a NECAP exam.
Looking at these (and virtually any other) aspects of mainstream education policy today makes it very clear that our system is not emphasizing critical thinking. We’re not supporting the ability to question. We’re not asking students to think deeply about problems around them and use independent thought to come up with solutions. We’re not training students to care about their neighborhoods, to feel pride in their cultures, or to think about the greater good.We’re not, in short, giving students access to any of the values or skills that oppressed populations need in order to create social change and improve the conditions of their communities. In fact, we—like our Virginian friends before us—are actively barring these skills from being taught.
Asking Tough Questions
Now, I’m (of course) not saying that most people who support test-based, no-excuse learning have sinister motives akin to those of 1830s Virginian slaveowners. Most of the folks working to expand these systems are sincere, hard-working individuals who believe they’re doing the right thing. But when we get higher up the decision-making chains of these organizations, I think we need to ask some tough questions.
Take, as an example, the Walcott Foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of Wal-Mart and which, over the past few years, has given many hundreds of millions of dollars to education reform leaders like Teach For America and KIPP. That sounds like a pretty nice thing to do, but we have to ask ourselves—is it actually in the interests of Wal-Mart, which relies on a minimum-wage workforce, to help ensure that every American has an opportunity to get a great education? Does Wal-Mart, which is infamous for worker abuse and wage theft, really want the predominantly poor people of color it hires to be able to think critically, to question authority, to demand fair treatment? Any way you want to spin it, the answer to these questionsis going to be no. Wal-Mart has a clear economic interest in creating an education system that produces obedient laborers who are proficient enough in reading and math to effectivelyfulfill their low-skill jobs,but compliant and unquestioning enough to accept their poverty wages. And Wal-Mart hasn’t gotten to where it is today by investing against its own economic interests.
Virginia’s slaveowners, in formulating a response to black rebellion, understood the critical role education can play in either inspiring social change or maintaining social control. Too many of us today fail to recognize this nuance. We think of education as a monolithically positive entity, but it’s not—it is simply the process by which we shape young people’s minds, and that means it can either be incredibly constructive or immensely damaging. We can either give students the tools and confidence they will need to stand up for themselves and work to change an unjust world, or we can force on them the blinders, submissive acceptance, and behavioral modification that our unjust world requires to keep them in their place (or to turn them into oppressors themselves). I challenge all of us in Rhode Island to think critically about both education and education reform. There needs to be some nuance in our understanding of these systems, or we run the risk of confusing repression with liberation, thereby making the social change most of us strive for even harder to obtain.
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