The book under review, by Dr. Eve Ewing of the University of Chicago, is a manifesto arguing for educational abolitionism: abolishing the American system of education as it currently exists and replacing it with one based much less on coercion and conformity and centered instead on positive encouragement for students to develop a desire to learn and exercise their creativity.   . Ewing makes the case that American education, as currently constructed, reinforces white supremacy and settler colonialist ideology–that it deeply harms the two most historically marginalized groups in the US: African Americans and Native Americans.

Ewing, an African American who earned a PhD in 2016 from Harvard (where she also edited the Harvard Educational Review), has based her scholarship and activism in critiquing what she views as the irredeemably racist foundations of American society. Her first scholarly work, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, was published in 2018 and covered the racism involved in public school closings in her native Chicago. She has also written books of poetry and prose, children’s books and comic books for Marvel–including iterations of Marvel’s Black Panther series–all dealing with themes of racial oppression. Her poetry collection 1919–which addresses the notorious anti-black riot which ravaged Chicago that year–was listed by NPR as being among the best books of 2019. She also serves on the editorial board of In These Times. She is highly critical of the capitalist system.

For Ewing, the American school system has carried prominently racist features up to the present  whose roots go well back in time, even to the late 18th century when Thomas Jefferson asserted in Notes on the State of Virginia that persons of African ancestry were vastly and innately inferior in intelligence to white people. As American settler colonial society implanted itself more and more on the American continent–and slavery was abolished–one of the leading questions vexing the American ruling class in the last decades of the nineteenth century related to the place of blacks and Native Americans in the white dominated broader society. 

Ewing profiles multiple prominent white Americans who–post Civil War–set about to devise educational tools with which to mold the two communities into docile menial laborers who accepted their subaltern fate and offered no threat of violence against the white supremacist social order. After the Civil War, the prominent anti-slavery activist Lydia Maria Child produced a textbook that was used in the freedmen’s schools and other institutions established in southern states to provide newly liberated slaves with a rudimentary education. Child’s text exhorted blacks to practice docility and christian forbearance in their dealings with white people: they were warned against violence as a response to white abuse. 

Reformers of Child’s ilk were in fear that newly freed black Americans would buy a small patch of land, build rudimentary lodgings, grow just enough food on which to subsist and spend the rest of their time dancing and living slothful and anti-social lives. In order to assimilate blacks–and native Americans–into mainstream American society, it was argued that they needed to internalize the notion that they were required to participate in the accumulation of American capitalist wealth, mainly as menial wage laborers. To this end, former Union Army general Samuel Armstrong Chapman founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton College) in Virginia in 1868 to train blacks in low wage agricultural labor–and to train blacks to be teachers at the Institute of the desired agricultural skills. 

More prominently, another former Union Army officer, William Henry Pratt, established a school at Fort Marion in Tallahassee, Florida in 1879 for Native American prisoners of war from the upper Midwest and Great Plains. Pratt is most famous for his phrase, uttered while giving a college commencement address in the 1890’s, of “kill the Indian, save the man,” a description of his belief that Indians could be fully assimilated into mainstream white American culture by forcing them to abandon Indian culture. Pratt’s efforts to “civilize” his prisoners by combining military discipline and teaching them the elements of Christianity and the properly docile behavior expected of them led to him overseeing the founding of the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, the first of many Indian boarding schools around the country. The boarding schools, overseen by the federal government, created horrific harms on generations of Native Americans. The students at the boarding schools were forcibly seized from their parents and subjected to modes of instruction based on the harshest forms of military discipline that Ewing observes were not designed to educate them in any real sense but to force docility upon them. Extreme physical violence was regularly meted out to students for alleged disciplinary infractions. Ewing notes that Estelle Reel, the federal superintendent of Indian boarding schools from 1898 to 1910 was heavily focused on pupil comportment in the curriculum she oversaw, writing out elaborately specific instructions for how students should sit at their desks, the particular manner in which they should place their elbows while sitting and so on. Scores of pupils died from violence and disease at the boarding schools, with many unmarked mass graves being discovered in recent years at both the former sites of American Indian boarding schools and similar institutions in Canada. Students were isolated and without the protection of their parents, which made them vulnerable in all too many cases to sexual abuse by school faculty. The boarding schools intended for the pupils to be locked into a life of menial labor–they farmed out the male students as laborers for various industrial and agricultural enterprises while the females were sent to white households to learn domestic service. The boarding schools barred American Indians from practicing their various religions, speaking their own languages or displaying any other manifestation of indigenous cultural practices. Native religious practice was outlawed in general in the United States until the 1970s. 

The racism of American schools made further strides during the Progressive Era as American academics latched onto intelligence testing as a way to sort the supposedly superior population (persons of northern and western European heritage) from the inferior (blacks, indigenous, other people of color as well as immigrants from eastern and southern Europe). Such testing became a way to justify racist policies ranging from racial segregation to forced sterilization of black and Indian women. The US military used intelligence tests devised by American progressive academics to allow it to identify and discard supposedly intellectually inferior prospective recruits during World War I. The intelligence testing mania took hold in American schools after World War I, continuing to afflict students today in the form of the various aptitude tests that supposedly represented a pure and flawless measure of both a student’s aptitude for learning and a teacher’s ability to teach. Ewing notes that both Alfred Binet, the French psychologist who created the IQ test and Carl Brighman, the American academic who created the SAT in the 1920’s, warned against using their respective tests as conclusive measurements of a person’s innate learning ability. Ewing quotes Binet as noting that an individual’s IQ can change significantly over time, depending on environmental influences.  However American educators have ignored their warnings. 

In the present day United States, Ewing writes that settler colonialism and white supremacy continue to exercise a baleful influence on black and indigenous students–who are, in many cases, not encouraged in educational settings to develop a love of learning and to exercise their creativity but are viewed as potential criminals who need to be tamed. Early in their schooling, children from these communities are all too often set on lower academic tracks than white students even if they show similar or greater levels of aptitude for learning. These students are typically subjected to harsher forms of discipline than white students, with the latter more likely to have their typical childish rowdy behavior overlooked as “just being a kid.” 

Ewing recalls an incident, apparently in the late 2000s, when, as a young middle school teacher at a predominantly black school in south Chicago, students in her classes went on a required field trip to a correctional facility where inmates lectured them on the perils of a life of crime. This trip to spend time in the company of roughneck inmates terrorized and deeply traumatized some of her brightest students and she laments that they were deprived of time in her classroom for potentially useful and intellectually stimulating activities and instead subjected to highly counterproductive “scared straight” lectures. She notes with dismay that a fellow black teacher at the same school confided to her his own belief that the kids were highly vulnerable to falling into a criminal lifestyle and needed to be exposed to “scared straight” presentations. 

In Ewing’s telling, the substance of education for many black and native children has not changed much since the days of Samuel Armstrong Chapman and Richard Henry Pratt. Both are viewed as potentially violent rebels against the social order who need to be “civilized”– taught to be docile and prepared for a life of low wage labor. 

The Way Forward

Ewing writes that American schooling is racist because American society as a whole is suffused with white supremacy and settler colonialist ideology. The United States’ wealth was built up by black enslavement and the theft of indigenous land. During the New Deal era and World War II, massive subsidies–almost entirely given to white people to the exclusion of people of color–were dispensed by the federal government through home loan programs and the GI bill. Such policies have laid a substantial basis for the enormous wealth gap between whites and non-whites that exists in this country to the present day. 

Moreover, many white Americans hold racist views, although it has become less socially acceptable in recent decades to express those views. Ewing notes that Charles Murray and Richard Herrenstein published the enormously influential The Bell Curve in 1994, arguing that racial differences in IQ tests were based on innate black inferiority in learning ability. More recently, the prominent pundit Andrew Sullivan, a writer for the prestigious intellectual journal The Atlantic, has played around with the idea of  innate differences in intelligence among races, offering the “I’m just asking questions” defense for flirting with biological racism. Meanwhile, in 1986, the General Social Survey based at the University of Chicago reported that 1 in 5 white polling respondents agreed with the idea that gaps in white-black achievement existed because “most Blacks have less in-born ability to learn.” In 2018, the affirmative answer to the same questions among white respondents was 1 in 12. Ewing is doubtful that these figures represent a significant decline in white adherence to biological racism; instead she thinks they indicate that publicly expressing explicit racism (at least while talking to pollsters) became less socially acceptable among whites between 1986 and 2018. 

Ewing believes that black and native communities need to directly control their own schools so they can ensure that a proper love of learning will be stimulated within their children. In fundamentally transforming American education, she wants to focus on the following question: “how do we center Black and Indigenous children themselves–center their notions of self-concept, of history and ancestry, of play and joy, of communal dreaming, of wonderment….?” She writes that “we can make schools for us–schools that are loving and nourishing, schools that celebrate our languages and cultural histories and intergenerational bonds, schools that teach stewardship and care of the land and one another.” 

Quoting the scholars Mariame Kaba and Andrea J Ritchie, Ewing writes that a foundation for the elimination of white supremacy and settler colonial ideology within US education can only occur with the enactment of a general socialist vision that dismantles carceral systems and enacts a broader transformation of American society: “meeting basic needs that include housing, health care, access to care for disabled people, childcare, elder care, a basic guaranteed income, and accessible, sustainable living-wage jobs that enable people to prevent, escape, intervene in, and transform the conditions that make violence possible.” 

Ewing’s book is well written; I believe she mirrors some of the thoughts of past thinkers who pondered the problem of achieving true human liberation under socialism. As Alexander Berkman once suggested, human beings are innately equipped with a desire to learn about the world around them and to create and shape that world on their own initiative and in collaboration with others. This innate capacity is what Karl Marx called “species being.” Under capitalism in general, the species being of the human race is severely warped into destructive and exploitative ends. Ewing’s book offers some food for thought about how education in the United States seriously harms human potential and what we might begin to do about it.

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