Education

Bekah McNeel 8-02-2023

A young boy reads a Bible. Samantha Sophia via Unsplash. 

Joshua was one of the star students in his Sunday school class at a Black Baptist church he and his family attended; his teacher raved about Joshua’s helpfulness and engagement. But when it came to preschool, Joshua’s parents were perplexed.

“Every day the preschool teacher has something negative to say about [him,]” Joshua’s father later told researchers.

Adam Russell Taylor 12-26-2022
An illustration of a father reading a book to his son. Other books are spread across a table in the background with a girl looking at an open book.

Illustration by Candice Evers

BLACK HISTORY MONTH traces back to Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which established the second week of February to be “Negro History Week” as a counterbalance to the erasure of Black contributions to U.S. history. Black educators and students at Kent State University created the first Black History Month celebration in 1970, and President Gerald Ford recognized it in 1976, the year I was born. While Black history deserves attention every month, the past few years have provided plenty of evidence for why this month of particular emphasis is still needed. God reminds us in many ways of the dangers of forgetting our history, including the command, “Remember your history, your long and rich history” (Isaiah 46:9, MSG).

As the father of two young Black boys, I spend a lot of time thinking about the role of education in shaping our nation’s future. What our kids learn about the nation and the world from their parents, teachers, and peers profoundly shapes their worldview. That in turn deeply affects the direction our society takes as today’s children become tomorrow’s leaders, activists, and voters. It’s no wonder that education has served as a political battleground at many times throughout our nation’s history — from the Scopes trial over the teaching of evolution to the battles over racial integration in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.

A row of yellow school buses parked behind a chain link fence.

School buses parked in a row. REUTERS/Stephen Lam

This Tuesday marked back to school day for my two boys, who are entering fourth and sixth grade at an Episcopal school that welcomes students of all faiths. The annual rite — which for our family always seems to involve the Mission: Impossible-style task, led by my wife, of getting all the right books and school supplies in time — left me with mixed feelings, which I suspect many fellow parents share. On one hand, I am excited for all the new school year offers my kids: new teachers, new friends, a new season of athletics, and all the other extracurricular activities that bring my kids so much joy. On the other, I feel the weight of a mounting crisis in our nation’s education system, especially in public schools, where the pandemic revealed such deep and long-standing racial inequities.

Russell Jeung 4-07-2022

Photo by Rachel Wisniewski, Reuters

This spring marks one year after mass shootings in Atlanta and Indianapolis killed Korean, Chinese, and Sikh Americans. In the year since, 1 in 5 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) nationwide have experienced a hate incident. I grieve over this nation’s racism.

Jayne Marie Smith 2-24-2022

In this opinion short, Sojourners explores the spiritual implications of the missing education and miseducation about Black Americans in the U.S. education system and our biblical mandate to be truth-tellers.

Mitchell Atencio 10-06-2021

Campus photo of Hartford Seminary. Photo courtesy of Hartford Seminary.

Joel Lohr, the president of soon-to-not-be “Hartford Seminary” sat with Sojourners’ assistant news editor Mitchell Atencio in late September to explain why the school is changing its name and what that change says about the future of theological education — and the church — in the United States.

Jim Wallis 7-16-2020

Social distancing dividers for students are seen in a classroom at St. Benedict School, amid the outbreak of COVID-19, in Montebello, near Los Angeles, July 14, 2020. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Families are anxious to hear whether, when, and how schools will reopen. They can’t. And it’s because of a failure of leadership.

Montana resident Kendra Espinoza, a key plaintiff in a major religious rights case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, poses in front of the white marble court building with her daughters Naomi (right) and Sarah (left) in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 19, 2020. REUTERS/Will Dunham/File Photo

The U.S. Supreme Court narrowed the separation of church and state in a major ruling on Tuesday by endorsing Montana tax credits that helped pay for students to attend religious schools, a decision paving the way for more public funding of faith-based institutions.

John Fea 5-07-2020

From 'The Seven Liberal Arts.' Francesco Pesellino. 1422-1457 Florence, Italy. 

Are we equipped to muster the political, moral, and spiritual resources necessary to sustain our republic? 

Matt Bernico 1-13-2020

Bob Jones University sign at entrance on Wade Hampton Boulevard, Greenville, S.C. Sept. 2007. Wikimedia Commons

Denny Burk, a professor at Boyce College, expressed an old strategy of Christian colleges to defend 'orthodoxy.' 

Aaron E. Sanchez 12-19-2019

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg holds a town hall event in Creston, Iowa, Nov. 25, 2019. REUTERS/Scott Morgan/File Photo

Meritocracy fails to give communities of color the comforts and privileges of mediocrity.

Photo illustration by Matt Chase

In his seminal work Mythologies, French philosopher and critical theorist Roland Barthes announces that “Myth is a type of speech.” And not simply any type of speech, but a dangerous kind. Myth is problematic, he says, because it allows a fictional brand of naturalism to subsume history. It creates a false narrative that the way things are is the way things are meant to be, leaving ample room for injustice to flourish.

Recently, the playwright Jeremy O. Harris tackled one particular section of American mythos: education. And, in typical Jeremy O. Harris fashion, his exploration is complicated.

I went to see Harris’ fantastical play “Yell: A ‘Documentary’ of My Time Here” in a state of fear and excitement, wondering what dirty laundry he would air about my then-future intellectual home.

Elizabeth Stice 6-20-2019

In May, Gordon College announced it would no longer have a history major as a result of its restructuring. Two months earlier, Wheeling Jesuit University reduced their programs down to eight, eliminating non-professional programs and even theology. These are just two recent responses to the economic challenges currently facing nearly all Christian institutions of higher learning. Across the country, as small religious schools are in a struggle for survival, they are cutting programs and closing their doors. The distress beacon for Christian higher education is currently blinking.

Andrew J. Wight 6-05-2019

Wayuú student shows the solar cell he built in a science workshop at the Ricardo Gomez School in Manaure, La Guajira, Colombia. Photo credit: Daniel López @dlopezphotography

On June 20, a rocket is scheduled to blast off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, USA, carrying a precious cargo: a solar cell science project from Nestor Epinayu, 16, and his fellow science club members from a small indigenous community in Colombia. More than just a children's science project, solar energy plays a huge role in bringing electricity to this community in La Guajira, on the border with Venezuela.

Jay Wamsted 4-29-2019

Image via Wikimedia Commons 

Many white Americans want racial reconciliation to be like Borges’s legend. Like my relative’s friend, they want race and racism to be “over.” They think that Black and indigenous populations should forget that we stole their land and their bodies, made ourselves rich off their goods and their labor. After all, most white people have forgotten these facts. Slavery and manifest destiny are in the past, they protest; the civil rights movement has guaranteed equality for all — it even led to a black president. Instead of listening and entering into dialogue — the true beginning of reconciliation — they square up in the kitchen and declare racism “an excuse.”

Jay Wamsted 3-26-2019

How do I explain this to Simon, the fact that large-scale neighborhood segregation too often goes hand in hand with economic deprivation. How do I tell him that it’s not that white people aren’t allowed, it’s that they are exercising their power to opt out? That Brown v. Board could only open school doors for black students, that it couldn’t keep white students from walking away? In other words, how do I explain the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow to a young child?

Amy Fallas 2-07-2019

Martin Luther King Jr. at a press conference for the 18th Ecumenical Student Conference in Ohio. Bola Ige of Nigeria is on the right. Dec. 27, 1959. Photo courtesy of Ohio University Digital Collections, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections.

On Dec. 30, 1959, over 3,000 Christian students gathered in Athens, Ohio, at the 18th Ecumenical Student Conference. Participating youth leaders and activists developed methods of engaging with social and political transformations at the turn of the 1960s. One of the key speakers was a 30-year-old Baptist preacher who emphasized a religious as well as civic prerogative for students, claiming: “whenever a crisis emerges in history, the church has a role to play.” While the specific crisis Martin Luther King Jr. referred to was the fight for civil rights in the segregated American South, he urged Christian students to challenge injustice undergirding all systemic discrimination, oppression, and racism at home and abroad.

Joe Kay 1-24-2019

John M. Chase / Shutterstock.com

Let's ask ourselves: Are we adults doing the best we can to teach young people what they need to know? What daily example are we setting for them in how we act and which leaders we endorse?

In my research and experience as a teacher educator, I have found social studies curricular materials (textbooks and state standards) routinely place indigenous peoples in a troubling narrative that promotes “Manifest Destiny” – the belief that the creation of the United States and the dominance of white American culture were destined and that the costs to others, especially to indigenous peoples, were justified.

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson gives the keynote address at the closing reception for the SNCC Digital Gateway Project in March 2018. Photo from SNCC Vimeo

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson is co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee, an organization founded in the 1930s as a “folk school” to train labor organizers throughout Appalachia and the South. In the 1950s, Highlander was an incubator for the civil rights movement, with trainings led by Septima Clark and Ella Baker. By the 1990s, the center supported anti-strip-mining battles in Appalachia and linked mountain organizers with anti-globalization efforts around the world. Today, Highlander draws on the strengths of immigrants, students, and other local leaders in the rural South to build popular education programs that advance cultural organizing for justice. Former Sojourners editorial assistant Faith Zamblé interviewed Henderson in July.

Faith Zamblé: How would you describe your work at the Highlander Center?

Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson: I describe it as a grand inheritance. I was 31 or 32 when I became the first black woman to be co-executive director of the Highlander Center. And I inherited 86 years of people’s stories and experiences and movement legacy. But with that legacy comes a great responsibility to make sure that the Highlander Center isn’t just a living museum, where people come to study what was; it should also be a place where people can learn how to do things now. It’s living in the past, present, and future at the same time, every day, all day.