I’ve never spent any time in these classrooms. I don’t know what happens in their classrooms.
Now, I’m not saying anything about the specific teachers that my Wednesday students have encountered at their high school. No wonder, the group of mostly Brown and Black girls we teach on Wednesdays is failing social studies. What Baldwin, Woodson, Loewen and so many others have been saying is that the myth-making that passes for history in America’s classrooms too often serves not as an introduction to the historical record nor as an invitation to inquire about our social world but rather as an elaborate justification of the racialized and racist social structure we live in. Similarly, in his 1963 “Talk to Teachers,” James Baldwin argued that the “bad faith,” “cruelty,” “brainwashing,” and “mythology” perpetuated by schools was nothing short of a “criminal conspiracy to destroy ” (para. These dehumanizing lies served as the “perfect device” for controlling and subjugating African Americans. In it, he argued that the lies of omission in schooling paint Africans and African Americans as “human being of the lower order, unable to subject passion to reason, and therefore useful only when made the hewer of wood and the drawer of water for others” (p. Woodson wrote The Miseducation of the Negroin 1933. While his content analysis of textbooks was groundbreaking, the argument itself was not: people of color have been questioning the truth of history curriculum and the role it plays in maintaining white supremacy for far longer.
In his book Lies My Teacher Told Me(first published in 1995), sociologist James Loewen systematically showed the public how the standard history curriculum is often only loosely connected to historical fact. We know that virtual schooling during the pandemic was hard for many of them, but we also know that the problems with social studies in most high schools stretch much farther back than March 2019. Learners who, for one reason or another, have not passed social studies and are therefore in danger of not graduating. For the past nine weeks, my colleague and I have been trying to craft an active, student-centered, place-based learning experience for our high school learners. That feels sacrilegious to say, but it also feels true. They like it when I stand up and tell them things while they sit back and listen. Last week, I was forced to admit something: My students want me to lecture. student in the EDPL program, was part of the discussion titled, “Big picture lessons from efforts to improve education outcomes for students, particularly low-income Black students, in Milwaukee and nationwide” (embedded below) where he discussed the issues impacting both local and national educational spaces.
IREMIND ED MARQUETTE SERIES
The series hopes to foster conversations and inspire students and future activists. In this four-part series, Fuller’s life and activism are highlighted through a series of conversations with students ranging from High School to Graduate school. And has also served as superintendent of Milwaukee Public Schools. Fuller has been an advocate of equitable education. He went on to found the Institute for Transformation of Learning in 1995.
An activist for educational opportunities, he joined Marquette as the Educational Opportunity Program’s associate director from 1979-1983. Fuller, distinguished professor emeritus of education, retired from Marquette in 2020. College of Education graduate student, Saúl López, was recently featured in Marquette’s “Paying it Forward” series with Dr.
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