Race, Power, and the Making of America's Schools

Looking back at the early history of U.S. education, Professor Jarvis Givens says we’ve long told the story in fragments: Native education in one lane, Black education in another, and the rise of white common schools as another. But in his latest research, he shows just how deeply interconnected these histories actually are, particularly how the development of public schools was entangled with Native land dispossession and the economic engine of slavery. This history is the focus of his new book, American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation.

“The reality is that it's not that Black and Native people were not included in the project of American school development, because public schooling in the U.S. was actually developed over and through Native and Black people's dispossession through their subjugation,” Givens says. “It's Native land loss and it's the kind of capital generated from race-based slavery that's really driving the economic development of the nation and also its internal institutions, schooling in particular.”

Givens introduces the idea of an “American grammar,” a framework in which race, power, and knowledge were built into the structure of schooling itself. That grammar hasn’t disappeared, he says, noting how today’s debates over curriculum, representation, and educational justice reflect it.

“If we're not being clear and if we're not being as nuanced and detailed as possible in how we're naming how we got to this place, then we can allow ourselves to work with faulty assumptions or faulty understandings about this history that then come to inform the solutions we try to create,” Givens says. “And that's one of the major issues I think that we're up against. How we narrate the past and how we narrate injustice has direct implications for how we go about bringing about justice in the context of schools.”

In this Harvard EdCast, Givens discusses what it means to rethink what we believe we know about the origins of American education and what becomes possible when we finally reckon with the full story.

Transcript

JILL ANDERSON: I'm Jill Anderson. This is The Harvard EdCast.

Jarvis Givens challenges how we've traditionally understood the history of American education. He's a Harvard professor who studies the relationship between race and power in schools. Like many of us, he understood the stories of Native, Black, and white schooling as parallel, but separate. Then he says he dug deeper, finding interconnected, yet often overlooked histories.

Now he's telling the story of how early American schooling isn't just about education, but about Native land being taken, Black people being barred from learning, and how these forces work together to shape the system. I asked Jarvis, how is it possible we've overlooked this history for so long?

JARVIS GIVENS: That's a question that I struggled with as I was researching these set of questions about the early relationship between the political economy of race and the early development of schooling in the US. And I think there are a different set of responses to that question.

One has to do with I think for a long period of time some of the scholars who were primarily concerned with the development of education in the US, when they did for the most part think about inequality, I think class was the major frame that they used to think about inequities or inequality in the context of early American schooling and didn't really have a kind of robust analysis of race and didn't take that as seriously as part of the kind of central story for thinking about the early development of schooling and injustice in society.

But then even when scholars did talk about questions pertaining to race, because to be fair, there are some scholars well before my time who raised some of these questions, and I'm not talking about specifically scholars writing about the history of Black education or the history of Native education. Those scholars were absolutely thinking critically about Black and Native education, but definitely in a more siloed way, trying to get a clear understanding about, for instance, the institutional development of Black education from the period of enslavement to after emancipation, so on and so forth, and really important work being done there.

However, when it came to overarching narratives of the development of education in the US, one of the main frameworks for thinking about injustice when it came to Black or Native people was the language of exclusion. And it was that Black people were unfortunately excluded from the Democratic project of public schooling early on in the US, and the big challenge was to correct this issue of exclusion and to open the doors of opportunity.

So this was one of the kind of major fights and challenges, is this narrative of Black people working to gain access to education because they have been excluded from that particular aspect of the political realm in the US.

I actually found that language of exclusion to be an actual misrepresentation of the history of what I refer to as racial domination in the US, because the reality is that it's not that Black and Native people were not included in the project of American school development, because public schooling in the US was actually developed over and through Native and Black people's dispossession through their subjugation.

It's Native land loss and it's the kind of capital generated from race-based slavery that's really driving the economic development of the nation and also its internal institutions, schooling in particular.

So when we talk about the language of exclusion, it assumes that Black and Native people are not a part of this story. And some of the historians explicitly say that, that there's not a lot of attention to Black and Native people because unfortunately they were not included in this story, except for Black people in a small number of segregated schools in early America might've existed.

And Native people, for the most part, are not included at all because the story of Indian boarding schools and missionary education is not seen as a part of the broader educational landscape of the nation. It's seen as something that's happening at the margins and outside of the mainstream kind of American public sphere.

So those frames, I think, are quite faulty, especially when we realized that racial domination was central to the development of schooling.

And so one of the things that I'm arguing is that while Black people and Native people may have experienced exclusion from certain kinds of educational opportunity, they're always central to the story of educational development in the US, and there are clear ways in which the same political leaders who are developing models for common schooling for white citizens are also conceiving of ways of keeping Black people out or excluding them to certain realms of education even as they're deeply invested in generating capital and resources by extracting value from enslaved Black labor, right?

And similarly, as they're invested in generating resources and continuing to kind of amass large quantities of Native land and projecting a kind of inevitable future of more Native land loss as they're imagining expanding the nation, right?

When we think about the land ordinances, that's projecting onto the future future expansion and new townships and new states that are going to be added, and this grid where the 16th plot of every new township of unchartered territory is going to then become a place for public schooling because public schooling is seen as central to maintaining the kind of coherence of the nation as it is yet expanding, right? And Native land loss is baked into the primary method for that tactic of expansion where education is understood to be central to that project.

So those are some of the things that I think are why scholars previously haven't kind of really taken these things seriously, not treating race seriously as an important frame of analysis, but also relying on some of the language or the frame of exclusion as when they do talk about the history of racial injustice as opposed to thinking about domination more seriously and at a structural level, such that it would lead us to understand that even when Black and Native people are not in the same classroom as white students, knowing that their subjugation is what's driving the kind of economic development of the nation makes us understand that they're always integral to the story of the development of democratic schooling for white citizenship because of this broader political economy of race.

JILL ANDERSON: I think I want to pick up a little bit on this idea of the early school systems being built on unceded Native land and finance through banks connected to the slave trade, which I think you just mentioned. How does uncovering that political economy of education help explain some of these longstanding inequities we see in schools today?

JARVIS GIVENS: I think one of the things that forces us to see is how schools, as one of the kind of major institutions in the context of the US, has been a key site for expressing the kind of inequities that exist in society and for socializing people into particular places that they're assumed to be fit for in society. And it's been one of the major kind of institutions that have reproduced social hierarchies in the society that we live in.

And we know that race has been a central kind of part of that story of social inequities from the very beginning, and this has to do with why Native and Black people experienced particular kinds of treatment when it comes to education over time, and these ideas are also reflected in the very content and the curricular infrastructure of schooling as well from the very beginning, which is something that I also uncover in my research, right? Looking at the way in which ideas about Black and Native people were reflected in history and literature taught in the 19th century.
But also, there are even some examples that I've uncovered in my research in 19th-century math textbooks with word problems discussing how you appropriately manage land and properly steward land that on the surface can seem like very neutral ideas, but they're very particular ideas about property ownership and the ownership of land that's very much so connected to the idea of settler colonialism.

And so thinking with the literature of settler colonialism that helps me understand how citizens are being formed in schools and what they're being taught to imagine as part of their futures, as a part of their work, just helps me take a step back and really process some of these ideas or word problems about a property owner who owns 12 enslaved people worth this amount of value, this amount in good deeds, what's the total amount of his assets or of his estate? So on and so forth. Right?

Finding in math textbooks these kinds of math problems that are imagining students, particularly some of the examples from the South, being future property owners and future slave owners, how else are they expected to kind of apply their mathematical knowledge if it's not about preserving their property or accounting for the property that they own which has to do with land which also has to do with people who are property, right?

And so there are ways in which the ideas around race shapes not only the kind of broader structure of schooling, but also the practices of sorting people into particular kinds of schooling or excluding them for particular kinds of schooling, but then also the kinds of ideas that become expressed in the very curriculum that's at the foundation of schooling that's being used to socialize individual people into the places they're supposed to fit in the broader society. Right?

This is something that I'm looking at in a very intricate way in the 19th century, but certainly these things carry over to the way schooling practices and policies become developed well into the 20th century.

Especially as it becomes it's not only Native, white, and Black people, but beyond the period that I've been researching, we get to a place where there's a much more complex set of racial demographics especially after for instance the Spanish-American War when we think about the influx of the groups of immigrants in the late 19th century into the early 20th century, right? But these same kinds of patterns where racial ideology informs school policies and practices that we see in the 19th century and how they develop relationally certainly carry over to the periods that come after.

JILL ANDERSON: Right. And we're going to get a little bit into that shortly, but before we get there, I want to talk a little bit about your research because you often bring in historical figures like Margaret Douglas, James McDonald, Susan McCoy, and you bring them to life in a certain way. But what do these individual stories reveal about the human stakes of America's earliest educational systems?

JARVIS GIVENS: Thank you for that question. When I was doing this research, and I was very clear that I wanted to talk about the kind of structural dynamics when it came to race and schooling in early America, but I realized that in order to tell the story in an effective way is I wanted people to understand that even as I'm talking about structure in terms of policies, laws, mechanisms of law and policy that are expressing certain racial ideas, that it also impacted people's lives in very intimate ways.

And to also show that Native, white, and Black people were in contact, in relationship with one another even as they might've been experiencing distinct kinds of racialized educational projects. Right? And I wanted to demonstrate that through the lives of some familiar figures. Right?
So I do bring in some individual figures. People like Booker T. Washington is someone that people might be familiar with if they're familiar with the history of Black education, but also someone like President Thomas Jefferson or James Garfield, right?

So it's important for people to see that even someone like Thomas Jefferson is having conversations with white missionaries who are building Indian boarding schools as a part of addressing issues with the American Indian Wars and explicitly talking about the relationship between Native education as an extension of the American Indian Wars and as a cheaper alternative to war, right?

Literally expressing these ideas and talking with people who are presidents of the United States or the US Secretary of War who's directly funding a lot of the early kind of missionary efforts among Native nations, as well as people like James Garfield, also a president of the United States, and placing him in his childhood as a teenage student by reading his diaries and seeing that even as he was a teenager in school, him and his classmates are talking about things like the discovery of gold in California and why there's a need to displace Native people because of this discovery, that him and his classmates as adolescent white male students in Antebellum Ohio are talking about whether or not Black people are mentally inferior to whites or whether or not the Fugitive Slave Act is or is not constitutional to demonstrate how these ideas of race and ideas about Black and Native people are also shaping and forming the identity of white students even as Black and Native people may not be physically in the classroom with these white students. Again, trying to demonstrate this relational formation of race.

So I wanted to use the lives of real people to realize that this is something that's impacting the lives of people in a very intimate way, or that someone like Booker T. Washington, who's only been thought about as someone who's relevant to Black education by many, to see, "Oh, how might our view of this story change when we realize that he was enslaved by a family where the mistress was a teacher on a nearby plantation who required him to carry her textbooks to and from the school where she's teaching local white students in Franklin County, Virginia?"

And these textbooks that she's using to teach white students on this school on a plantation, obviously there's a direct link between the development of schooling in this context and Native land loss and slavery, but then also thinking about what are those textbooks she's likely using in that classroom? And then having to open up and say, "Well, let's look at Antebellum textbooks and curriculum used in schools during the period and see how ideas about race and about Black and Native people are appearing in the context of these schools."

Or what might it have meant for these white students attending the school to see a young Booker T. Washington, a slave owned by their teacher, escorting her to and from school, an instrument being used in service of their education, right? How is that also something that's a part of the kind of process of white students going to common schools during this period who may have been observing and seeing these things, right?

And I think when you place real people in the story that contemporary readers and people concerned with education are familiar with, it helps them start to rethink some things that we have taken for granted and to see some things that we thought were familiar in unfamiliar ways, and to see these relationships that have always existed in the lives of these people like Garfield, like Thomas Jefferson and Booker T. Washington but to realize that there's been an important part of the story that we haven't been told, or the way that the stories have been organized have distorted the way that we've been able to see this past that have structured our present.

JILL ANDERSON: You've written about the idea of an American grammar, how race, power, and knowledge has been encoded in schooling, something you also have spoken about. How does that framework help us think differently about today's debates over curriculum, access, and educational justice?

JARVIS GIVENS: Well, I think especially in the current moment, it helps us understand that we need to understand the present day racial inequities, current debates around what should and should not be taught about race in school as connected to a much longer continuum around the political economy of race when it comes to schooling, that the kind of contemporary education systems that we've inherited are education systems that were derived from this early history around Native land loss and slavery that I talked about earlier on.

And just to give an example, I think it's important for people to understand that when I talked about these early establishment of school funds for instance, it's not just that these school funds were established in the periods of early America through Native land loss through these land grants, but we have to understand that schools to this day continue to receive billions of dollars from the proceeds from funding from land grants that have these kind of residual effects in terms of thinking about the national educational landscape today.

So this is not just something that happened early on, but what I'm saying with the language of American Grammar is that this is the structure that kind of gave form to the American education system, and that it continued to build and extend from this early infrastructure, these early kind of policies and laws that gave form to education as a central pillar of the society that we live in, and there's never been a point where that relationship was dissolved, but it certainly evolved in different ways and it's expanded.

But the relationships, when I talk about the relational formation of race through early schooling, that's something that has persisted, and it's something that we see being negotiated today when we talk about disciplinary rates, about particular racial demographics in schools.
When we talk about the representation of particular groups in curriculum, which perspectives get to shape interpretations of history that become seen as legitimate knowledge that's taught in schools, that's the basis of curriculum, these are debates that's connected to this very long story about the interaction between race and racial ideas and the development of school infrastructure, curriculum and policies and practices.

JILL ANDERSON: So for you, what does it mean to confront this history honestly, not just as an academic exercise, but really as the means to imagining more just and equitable schools today?

JARVIS GIVENS: I do the work of uncovering these things because how we talk about harm in schools and how we name injustice has a direct impact on the kinds of remedies and strategies for reconciling these past harms, how they play out, right?

For me, if we're not being clear and if we're not being as nuanced and detailed as possible in how we're naming how we got to this place, then we can allow ourselves to work with faulty assumptions or faulty understandings about this history that then come to inform the solutions we try to create.

And that's one of the major issues I think that we're up against. How we narrate the past and how we narrate injustice has direct implications for how we go about bringing about justice in the context of schools.

For instance, when we talk about exclusion as the primary frame for thinking about injustice in schools, then that assumes for some that just opening the doors of opportunity and access and allowing everyone to compete equally for educational opportunities and to get access to educational opportunities would then be the remedy to that particular form of injustice, right?

If exclusion was the problem, then inclusion and opening the doors for everyone to gain access is the way that it's remedied, and that we know is a very limiting and short-sighted solution. Well, one, it assumes that all the institutions are ideal on the inside to begin with. Right? If we would only just open the doors, then everything would be okay, right? And we know that that's not necessarily the only thing that would remedy the past injustices.

The history of school desegregation helps us understand that very, very clearly, and I think that there are lots of lessons that can be learned when we actually study more deeply about how injustice was deeply ingrained in the context of education. It's not only about access and opportunity, but it's also about the way in which educational development in the context of this country had always been in direct relationship to the dispossession of particular groups of people.

And that is something that has persisted, the way in which educational opportunities for some has always been directly connected to educational underdevelopment and dispossession for others. And I think that that's something that we have to reconcile and think about how this aspect of the very infrastructure of our national education system has continued to kind of reassert itself in this particular set of functions over time even as the ways that it's taken form, has looked different and has evolved into different forms and things like that over time, but I think getting clear about this early relationship helps us see some of these things a lot more clearly and be a bit more intentional when we are trying to develop solutions to the current problems that we have.

JILL ANDERSON: Jarvis Givens is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He's the author of American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation.

I'm Jill Anderson. This is The Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.