Reshaping Schooling: How the History of Black and Native Education Can Inform Our Future

Writer and scholar Eve L. Ewing, Ed.M.’13, Ed.D.’16, wants people to talk, not just about how American schools started, but also how that can inform the future of schools, especially for Black and Native children. She argues that Black and Native children’s schooling experience is more than just a footnote, but a central narrative in history.

“From the very first classes that I taught, I always began by telling my students, you cannot understand the history of schools in this country if you don't understand schools for Black people and schools for Native people,” she says. “Those are foundational to understanding the history of American public schooling.”

Those historical foundations of American public schooling are the focus of her new book, Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism. Ewing explains that her book was born from a need to unify discussions on these histories, structured around three themes: discipline and punishment, intellectual inferiority, and economic subjugation.

The University of Chicago associate professor highlights how the education system has been shaped by racist ideologies, many envisioned by Thomas Jefferson, and have only strengthened racial divisions. Those legacies continue today, with curriculums that downplay darker aspects of American history, and raise deep questions about what is the purpose of school. “There are a lot of unspoken assumptions, uninterrogated assumptions about what makes great education for Black and Native kids in particular, for low-income kids of all racial backgrounds, for kids of color of all income backgrounds, that sometimes isn't actually great for them,” she says.

She hopes that educators can find meaning by understanding history and possibly find ways to create a new future for schools. “These are long and old systems, but they were created by people, and we are also people, right? And it is also within our power to examine and critique those systems and create new ones,” she says.

In this episode, Ewing calls for honest conversations about history, a reevaluation of education’s purpose, and collective action to challenge systemic oppression in schools.

Transcript

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

Eve L. Ewing wants people to recognize the history of education in America is deeply rooted in systems of control, exclusion, and inequality, particularly for Black and Native children. But, she argues, history doesn't have to determine our future. She's an associate professor at the University of Chicago, where she studies schools as social institutions, examining how they construct, normalize, and reinforce social inequality.

Her new book, Original Sin, explores how the U.S. school system has reinforced racial hierarchies, conditioning children for inequality. I spoke to her about why schools were designed the way they are and why reforms seem to fail while wanting to know if we can break free from the past. First, I asked what led to this work.

EVE L. EWING: I started teaching classes on education in academia about 10 years ago. From the very first classes that I taught, I always began by telling my students, you cannot understand the history of schools in this country if you don't understand schools for Black people and schools for Native people. Those are foundational to understanding the history of American public schooling.

And in a lot of classic history of education curricula and books and things like that, people of color in general were kind of like the sidebar or the special chapter or the footnote. And my argument is, this is not just like a separate history; this is the main story, this is the main throughline. And you don't really get the system if you don't get this.

I, every year, would teach my courses with these opening sections. And eventually on the syllabus, I started calling them original sins. So, I would say, original sins week 1, original sins week 2. And every year as I revised my curricula, I would ask colleagues, hey, is there a great book or an article or something I can assign that really unifies these topics and brings them together in a coherent way? And there wasn't. And so eventually I said, well, I guess I should write it myself.

JILL ANDERSON: How did you approach writing this about both Black and Native experiences in education, given that there are distinct yet interconnected histories of oppression there?

EVE L. EWING: The way you put it is a great way to put it-- distinct but interconnected. I think it was very important for me to at no point act as though these histories are interchangeable or the same, or can be kind of blended together, nor do I want them to feel like they're in competition with each other. A lot of times in academic spaces, we get into this competitive sort of scarcity mindset of saying, whose history is the worst? That's not a race to the bottom that I find to be really productive or helpful.

And so throughout the book, I knew that I had these kinds of pillars that structure the book. One is the idea of discipline and punishment, so the idea that some people, some children, their bodies require control and that school has to exert control over them. One is the idea of intellectual inferiority, the idea that some people are inherently less intelligent than other people. And the third is the idea of economic subjugation, that some people are always going to be destined to occupy the bottom of the capitalist economic ladder and that school reinforces that and normalizes that.

I knew I had these kinds of three tracks, three pillars. I tried my best to draw connections where I saw there as being complementary connections, while never aligning them or mushing them together in a way that felt disrespectful. And I really hope that that is a space to begin a conversation, for people of many different backgrounds to come in and say, wow, I really see these connections here, and let's use that as a basis for action. Let's use that as a basis for political solidarity or for transforming schooling spaces together.

JILL ANDERSON: You open with, what's the purpose of schools? And it's simple when you think of it on maybe a personal level, but more complex when you frame it in society. How do you think the historical experience of Black and Native children challenge conventional answers to that question?

EVE L. EWING: I love that deceptively simple question. You're someone who's based at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and having gone there myself for my doctorate and interacted with lots of different education scholars there and people you have on this podcast and people I see at conferences, it's interesting how different our approaches are to how we think a good school comes into being in ways that often don't really interrogate what we're actually trying to do. And so sometimes we haven't actually answered that question for ourselves. What is the purpose of school? What is a good school? What does school reform mean? What are we actually striving towards? And I think that there are a lot of unspoken assumptions, uninterrogated assumptions about what makes great education for Black and Native kids in particular, for low-income kids of all racial backgrounds, for kids of color of all income backgrounds, that sometimes isn't actually great for them, right?

And so to give you an example, let's say that there is a really good school by many metrics. It has a really high graduation rate and really great test scores, and the kids have all kinds of amazing extracurricular activities and whatever the case may be. And if the Black kids in that school are every year more likely to be suspended, more likely to be expelled, or if they're very isolated, or if they never read about their own history in the curriculum, can we fairly say that that is a good school for those students? Hard to say. Just by sitting down and asking yourself, asking people in your community, what is the purpose of school, it can be a really helpful place to begin a conversation. That's where I start my classes every year, is just to have students brainstorm, like, why do we do this? Right? Why do we-- this is one of the few kind of mostly universal, compulsory institutions that people really interact with in our country. So what is it all for?

JILL ANDERSON: Your book suggests this idea that no matter how much time goes by, we're still tied to the ideologies of early American leaders like Thomas Jefferson and almost that there's this continuity by design. Why haven't we been able to break free?

EVE L. EWING: Yeah, I mean, that's a question that keeps me up at night. But I think that history is very instructive, but it's not predestination. And so a lot of my work is about really trying to fudge the boundaries between the past, present, and the future. And I'm not a big believer in linear time. A lot of my work is in the tradition of Afrofuturism. And so I really think that a lot of our assumptions about time as being inherently progressive are not real, are not true, are not borne out by evidence. But that being said, I don't think that it means that we're doomed to always repeat the same ideologies of the past. I think that how we break free, number one, I think there are always people, always places, always spaces where those acts of resistance and really transformation, ideological transformation are happening all the time, all around us. And so how do we elevate, amplify, join, empower that work? How do we look for it? How do we find it? How do we see it, and how do we strengthen it, I think, is really important.

And the other thing is, like, I think we have to have ugly, hard conversations about history, right? I'm clearly not the only one who has that belief, because I also think that if you were to try to mount an authoritarian government and you wanted to disempower people to be able to challenge you, it turns out one of the first and most effective things you do is try to exert really strict controls over what and how and who they teach.

I think that people that are not in favor of a more just society, not in favor of an equitable and participatory democracy, not in favor of a transformed social world, they clearly think schools are very powerful. They clearly think educators and students are very powerful because they're trying to do a lot to control them. So I think that that in itself is instructive about the power of beginning with history.

JILL ANDERSON: I want to dive in a little bit more about something you write about, which I was really struck by, which is the comparison between many early immigrant groups to America and the Black and Native experience. I think oftentimes, especially from white people, you will hear comparisons to racism-- well, you know, the Irish experienced the same thing, or whoever who came in experienced some discrimination. And you talk about that in the context of schooling and assimilation into white mainstream. Talk about that a little bit, about the differences between this historical immigrant assimilation into American schooling versus what Black and Natives experienced.

EVE L. EWING: If you look back historically, you can find evidence of Benjamin Franklin complaining about all the German immigrants, right? Like, oh, there's so many German immigrants that soon we're all going to have to learn to speak German, right, in this disparaging way. And then once the Irish immigrants come, it's like, oh, well, the Germans are great, and they were good and they followed directions. But now the Irish are the foreigners.

And when people from Eastern and Southern Europe start coming, it's like, oh, these Italians, they're not the good ones, like the Germans and the Irish were. So there's these successive waves of what Nell Irvin Painter calls these expansions of whiteness, these broadening of whiteness over time.

And by the way, many people, myself included, have been taught at different points in their schooling that that path of, like, first you're discriminated against, then you work hard and you assimilate, and then you are like fully participatory in the American project, that that is the natural stepwise order of things. So then the question becomes, why are the people who have been here the longest not included in that same process of belonging?

And I think that the reason is that the United States now, in the present, as you and I are having this conversation, is still a country that is founded on racist, genocidal, and enslaving principles and actions. Right? And that is the land that we dwell on, the ongoing exclusion and discrimination of people, but also the ongoing profit motive of companies and people that have benefited from not only formerly enslaved people, but also incarceration as one of the afterlives of slavery.

Many people, as we looked recently over the absolutely tragic fires that have happened in California, have started some tough conversations about why the people that are fighting those fires are often incarcerated people being paid so little that it is tantamount to being enslaved, working for free, and then not eligible to come out and get a regular firefighting job after they've been incarcerated. And so our country still is benefiting, resting on the edifices of these thefts. And so therefore, it's really dangerous and kind of inimical to the country itself to potentially include the people who have been victims of that theft. If you tell those people, yes, you are humans just like us, and you have rights, and you belong here, then there are a lot of questions you have to answer about a lot of things and that would erode, again, not only the foundation of the United States of the past, but the United States of the present. So that's very dangerous. And I think that that is the material reason why we don't see some of those same patterns of assimilation.

JILL ANDERSON: Many people believe public education has been this great equalizer. But the data we have on school funding, on discipline, on access to resources, on almost everything tells a very different story. What do you think is fueling the disconnect there between perception and reality?

EVE L. EWING: I think that people want to believe that the systems that we're a part of are fundamentally just. Because it is discouraging to believe otherwise, and also because the idea of meritocracy and of earning what you have through your own strivings is so deeply baked into American culture and so, so crucial and fundamental to how people think of themselves that it's very frightening to face the contrary possibility.

One of my favorite pieces of research, that I was actually first introduced to by John B. Diamond when I was in graduate school, is a work by a sociologist named Thomas Shapiro. He's a white dude, and he interviewed people from many different backgrounds, especially white and Black people from different class backgrounds, about the issue of inheritance. And one of the things he found that's so interesting is he would ask people-- almost exclusively white people who are middle class or affluent, who had inherited something from a family member. He'd ask them, what are some of the things that you inherited? And people would list all these things. Well, my parents helped us pay for law school. They gave us a down payment on our house. They paid for my child's childcare. They paid for my phone. All of these things, sometimes just large cash sums, right? They didn't want me to go into debt, and so gave us this, my mother, my grandmother, my father, and so on and so forth.

And we know from all kinds of history that everything from redlining to employment discrimination to the GI Bill to "insert historical fact here," has contributed to the fact that some people have wealth to leave to their heirs and some people don't. And he would then ask them, OK, tell me about how you succeeded in law school, or tell me about how you got this beautiful house that you have. And people would tell him within seconds, oh, we just worked really hard. [LAUGHS] We just worked really hard for it, seemingly unaware of this pretty obvious dissonance between the story that they just told, which is, somebody in my family had some money and they helped me out, and then their own narrative that they worked hard. And it's because it's considered to be immoral, or that you're a bad person or a lesser person if you didn't strive and work for everything that you have. That's so much part of this self-made American mythos.

I think that that is really challenging to people. And I think that it's scary and upsetting to think, maybe this isn't all entirely based on my own efforts. And I understand that. But the thing is, the flip side of that is that if we have that illusion, if we have that myth, number one, it's not grounded in fact. But number two, we're lying to people and telling them that their persistent poverty, that they are persistent failures to experience social mobility, are failures of themselves, right? Individual failures, interpersonal failures.

And that's something that, in different ways, we give that message to kids at a really young age. And it's messed up, you know? And so I think that even if it's uncomfortable, we have to get a little bit more comfortable with talking about how the system is not equal. It's not fair, and that's OK. It's not OK that it's not fair, but it's OK that you got some privileges that other people don't have. Doesn't make you less of a person.

JILL ANDERSON: I find it really interesting when you get into the throes of testing, all the education research, all the data supports that things are inequitable in our schooling system. But you push back a little bit about the testing movement.

EVE L. EWING: Well, I think that tests are one tool that we can use to assess what people know in one very limited, one very time-bound context, right? Part of the problem with testing, that people have talked about for a couple generations at this point, is the incredible high stakes that are attached to those tests that disproportionately harm often the communities that have the least resources. But in my book, I wanted to extend the conversation a little bit further back and to say, what are we including in these tests? Why do we do them? What is the actual purpose? And what are some of the presumptions about knowledge, about forms of intelligence, about what we're trying to do when we send kids to school every day, that go uninterrogated and unexamined?

One of the things I talk about quite a bit is the IQ test, which people of many different political persuasions and different ideological beliefs often talk about IQ kind of nonchalantly, as though it's just like an objectively real thing. People talk about the notion of giftedness or genius as though these are objectively real things. And once you start learning the history of these tests and looking at some of the content of these tests, it just becomes really hard to defend that argument.

One of my favorite things I like to do with my students is to show them examples from the Army Alpha and Beta tests, which were essentially the first standardized tests in the United States. And I include some of the photos and images from them in the book as well. And you see really quickly how some of what is being presented as, quote unquote, "intelligence" is such specific cultural knowledge. And that becomes more obvious from our 21st century vantage point, because we would get a lot of the questions wrong, right? Like question like, what do you do if you're carrying a load of coal on your wagon and your wagon gets stuck in the mud? Like, I don't know, you don't know, but also somebody that just immigrated to the United States from a place where they didn't haul coal, maybe that person also doesn't know. A lot of these things that get passed off as general knowledge or common sense are not so much.

And furthermore, one of the things I really think is important to realize is that the people who were the creators of the tests also did not believe that Black and Native people were equivalent in intelligence-- the histories, the predecessors of the contemporary testing movement. And so I just think, again, that's something that we have to talk about. And we have to ask ourselves, what does it mean to continue to be enacting a regime that was created by people that were doing so with often explicitly eugenicist beliefs and aims?

JILL ANDERSON: Your work presents a difficult but necessary history, and it may leave many, I'm going to use the word "good faith" educators feeling trapped within an entrenched system. How do you think educators can navigate the tension between recognizing their role in the system and working to change it?

EVE L. EWING: I was a classroom teacher. I was a middle-school public school teacher. And so I know what it's like to have to compromise your beliefs. I know what it's like, first of all, to not even have a lot of time to read a long 400-page book and then talk about it with people. It was really important to me to not be wagging my finger at educators or at community members or parents. And also, I don't want people to feel like, OK, well, we're all just doomed from the start and there's nothing to do.

Part of why I didn't want to end the book with, like, here's your 10 easy steps that you can take in your school to fix racism, is, number one, to understand that these are long and old systems, but they were created by people, and we are also people, right? And it is also within our power to examine and critique those systems and create new ones. But what I really hope is that educators will start with something specific, something small, and that if there is just one chapter, one page, one paragraph of the book that you read it and you think, ‘Oh, my gosh, I really see the connection with this thing that we've been doing in my school right now-- like the way we line up, the way we do lunch, the way we do homework, the way we do detention, whatever the case may be’-- and to have that as a departure, a point of departure for a conversation and to do that work collectively.

In our culture, there's often the myth of the super teacher who comes in and saves everybody's life by themselves, you know? And I really think that this is collective organizing work. And so I understand that feeling of being trapped. But the people who created these systems, they were not gods. They were not special or different than us. They were regular humans just like us. And so if they could create these systems collectively, we have to think about what we are able to create collectively. And we have to start somewhere.

JILL ANDERSON: Thank you so much.

EVE L. EWING: Thank you. Thank you for the lovely questions.

JILL ANDERSON: Eve L. Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She's the author of Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism. I'm Jill Anderson. This is the Harvard EdCast, produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Thanks for listening.