33 pages • 1 hour read
Carter WoodsonThe Mis-Education of the Negro
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1933A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Index of Terms
Public Education in the United States
The crux of Woodson’s argument relies on understanding public education in the United States as it existed in the early 1900s. During this time period, education remained segregated, and most Black people would have gone to school, at least in the South, with White teachers. As Woodson describes, this education system prepares Black people only “to begin the life of an Americanized or Europeanized white man” (20). This is a huge issue to Woodson because Black people, upon leaving the public school, would “go back to [their] own people from whom [they have] been estranged” (20). The disillusionment created by a “Americanized” education for a social life that Black people were not permitted to participate in is a harmful psychological tool set up by a White supremacist system to continue placing Black people in an inferior position.
Woodson argues that a more appropriate action would be to revise the “antiquated process” (15) in US schools, describing this system as not even hitting “the mark […] in the case of the needs of the white man himself” (15). Instead, education to Woodson is a process that should take into account a person’s background and how to “begin with [them] as [they are]” (81), whether Black or White.
The “Educated Negro”
Woodson repeatedly refers to the “educated Negro,” a person who has “turned away from the people” (40) as a result of the “propaganda which has been instilled into his mind under the pretext of education” (36). To Woodson, these “educated” Black people are a painful reminder of the failures of the education system and should be more responsible for solving “some of the problems now confronting the race” (36). Part of the reason for Woodson’s use of quotation marks is to underscore how seriously harmful he believes the education system to be: The people he is describing are, in many cases, Black people who have obtained advanced degrees in professional fields yet are stuck with mindsets that are oppressive in nature.
Curriculum
Curriculum is referenced repeatedly and is a key thematic element of Woodson’s arguments. It is of the utmost importance, Woodson argues, to both “hold on to the real facts of history as they are but complete such knowledge by studying also the history of races and nations which have been purposely ignored” (82). Woodson believes it is important for US curriculum to undergo significant revision so that it can more accurately portray the facts of history, as well as to support Black people to “learn to think” (100) rather than just regurgitate oppressive and inaccurate pieces of information.
Woodson also pushes back on the “rewriters of history” (54) who intentionally, post-Emancipation, produced curricula that represented slavery as “a benevolent institution” and suggested that “it was a mistake to make the Negro a citizen” (54). To have such claims in the public school curriculum would mean that all Black students would receive an education that implied that “the status of the Negro […] was justly fixed as that of an inferior” (27). Woodson believes that if curriculum was more appropriately representative and historically accurate, it would be positive for all students, especially Black students.
