We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

Education Can’t Save Us. We Have to Save Education

According to Love, abolitionist teaching is less a pedagogical approach and more a way of life that aims to end injustice. Solidarity is necessary to bring about freedom. Teachers, alongside school administrations, parents, and students, must tear down the educational system and reimagine schools, writes Love. There is no blueprint for abolitionist teaching. Some educators will foster homeplaces for students, while others will attend community protests. Some teachers will stress social justice in their courses, while others will lobby their local governments for better healthcare and housing. The process will be complex and filled with setbacks and disagreements.

Tweaking the System Is Not Enough

Love argues that white rage has countered virtually all efforts to reform schools. Thus, Love promotes doing away with the current education system, not reforming it. Quick solutions, such as more testing, surveillance, and punishment, will not fix schools. Addressing racial injustice and inequality is the only path forward.

Achievement Gap (Sharecropping)

The achievement gap reflects centuries of racial injustice and oppression. According to Love, Black students are like sharecroppers who live and work on someone else’s land but can never make up what they owe. Despite the obstacles, Black children and their families strive for better lives. This endurance is central to abolitionist teaching. Educators must reflect on the white rage and racism that created America’s educational survival complex. They must reimagine education in terms of the freedom dreams of Black communities. Resistance, love, and joy are possible if people of color thrive and matter to their country.

Beacon Hill

Beacon Hill in Boston exemplifies what Black people can accomplish when they adopt abolitionism as a way of life. From the late-18th to the mid-19th century, Beacon Hill was home to a free Black community with several stops on the Underground Railroad, one of which hosted famed abolitionists Ellen and William Craft. It was also the location of the African Meeting House, where abolitionists and Black feminists gave historic speeches, and Portia Law School, the first women’s only law school in the country. In 1798, residents of Beacon Hill opened the African School for local children. Fifty years later, the Philips School in Beacon Hill became the state’s first integrated school. Beacon Hill residents refused to normalize racism, white rage, and hate. Their vision of the future was bold and creative, emphasizing solidarity and collectivism, traits that are also important to abolitionist pedagogy.

Love delves into the rich history of Beacon Hill and its famous residents. Among these are Lewis and Harriet Hayden, whose home functioned as a safehouse for escaped enslaved people, housing a secret tunnel to the Underground Railroad. The couple is best known for sheltering Ellen and William Craft, two runaway enslaved people who fueled the abolitionist movement in the US and abroad. Ellen, a woman with light skin and a diverse racial background, pretended to be William’s owner when the pair fled their plantation in Macon, Georgia. They stopped in South Carolina and Pennsylvania before finally arriving at the Haydens’ house in Beacon Hill, where they became outspoken members of the local abolitionist community.

The Crafts moved to England after slavecatchers came looking for them in Boston, settling in West London and becoming key figures in Britain’s abolitionist movement. The About a decade later, they returned to Georgia and opened a school for newly emancipated slaves. The Crafts’ abolitionist work in the US and UK would not have been possible without the help of the Haydens and the support of the Beacon Hill community. Other notable abolitionists associated with Beacon Hill include William Lloyd Garrison, who published an antislavery newspaper, and Lucretia Mott, co-founder of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Mott was also involved in the women’s suffrage movement, which has a fraught history tainted by racism. Frederick Douglass and Maria Steward, an early Black feminist, are also associated with Beacon Hill because they gave historic speeches at the African Meeting House.

Congo Square

Congo Square is part of Louis Armstrong Park in Tremé, the oldest Black neighborhood in New Orleans. From the mid-18th century onward, enslaved people, freed people, and Native Americans gathered in Congo Square on Sundays for worship and commerce. Music was central to the experience, as was communal healing. Congo Square was a place where people could honor their roots. Thus, it was associated with resistance and joy. Places like Congo Square are important to abolitionist teaching because they support resistance and nurture memory, healing, humanity, and joy through art.

Art

Art engenders creativity, which is necessary to change society. It helps people connect to things they have lost and spurs them to envision a new future. Art education matters because it helps Black children make sense of injustice. Art can serve as a homeplace and a space to find one’s voice. It can also serve as an outlet for strong emotions, fostering a sense of freedom. Like art, social justice requires creativity. Abolitionist teaching demands reimagining the education system. The imaginary can help create a new reality that promotes democracy and equity.

Freedom Dreaming

Freedom dreaming fuels abolitionist education. Freedom dreams focus on collective resistance to injustice. According to Love, underfunded, underperforming schools are the norm, as are school shootings, aggressive policing, and racist teachers. The system holds Black children accountable for its failures. They are held back academically and then pushed out of the system with limited survival skills. Freedom dreaming can help dismantle the educational survival complex and build a school system that enables, supports, and loves all children. Creating lasting change is difficult. Racism, sexism, and other inequities hinder change. Understanding structural inequality is central to freedom dreaming. To build education anew, it is imperative to understand the flaws of the current system.

Watch Out for Takers

Some individuals, groups, and corporations seek to capitalize on social justice movements. Corporate America has a history of co-opting social justice for its own gains though advertising. Their references to social justice generally center whiteness, minimize complex issues, and communicate that Black people need white people to save them.

The Work

People across the country have experimented with abolitionist education. In 1998, for example, the Unified School District in Tucson, Arizona started offering courses in Mexican American history, art, and literature. These courses increased attendance, graduation rates, and college enrollment. In 2010, however, the state banned ethnic studies courses, arguing that they incite resentment toward white people. Teachers, students, and their families lobbied to restore the courses by reciting ancient Mayan poetry and organizing a youth grassroots movement. In 2017, a federal court overturned the state’s decision. Other experiments with abolitionism include the 2018 walkout and call for gun reform by students who survived the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. On 14 February 2018, a 19-year-old student opened fire at the school, killing 14 of his classmates and three staff members. 17 others were injured in the rampage. In the following weeks and months, students from Parkland organized and inspired walkouts in schools across the country to protest gun violence and call for gun reform. The same year, teachers and parents across the country participated in Black Lives Matter Week of Action in Our Schools to bring an end to racism and discrimination. These examples of collective action, rebellion, and visionary thinking are key to ending the educational survival complex.

Solidarity

The removal of the Confederate flag from South Carolina’s State House by Black Lives Matter activists in 2015 was an act of protest and an act of solidarity with victims of racial violence. A solitary woman climbed the flagpole, but the project was a group effort. Activists donated climbing equipment, helped the woman train, and held on to the pole to prevent police from tasing it to force her down. Strangers came together and risked their lives to remove a symbol of racism. Key players were white. For Love, these people are more than allies; they are coconspirators.

Coconspirators, Not Allies

The language of activism is evolving. The term allies is increasingly being replaced with coconspirators. In Love’s view, allyship is mutually beneficial to all parties. According to the author, allies do not necessarily question their privilege and whiteness, de-center their voices, or have strong relationships with people of color. Allyship is performative and often self-glorifying. By contrast, coconspirators understand how whiteness functions in American society. They are willing to leverage their privilege and power to support people of color. They also stand in solidarity with Black Americans to confront racism and other forms of discrimination. Activists use the term coconspirator to denote actions that sustain “life-giving ally relationships” (118). White people must do the work of confronting whiteness to become coconspirators, writes Love.

Black Joy

Joy is central to social change because it highlights humanity, self-determination, and love. Joy is also the basis of freedom dreams. For Black people, joy is about fully embracing their humanity, celebrating their identity, and communicating to the world that their Blackness makes them beautiful and strong. Black joy is also about appreciating a zest for life and not being defined by trauma. Activists of all races must find joy to build a new educational system and create a more just world.

Accountability

The education survival complex holds teachers accountable for their students’ achievements and failures in the classroom. The federal government began monitoring student achievement in 2001 with No Child Left Behind. Corporations flooded the education sector with test materials and other monitoring tools. Accountability, however, is more than measuring academic achievement. Teachers must also be held accountable for injustices in the classroom. Abolitionist teachers must strive to help Black children by focusing on justice, healing, and love. Like all systems grounded in intersectional justice and participatory democracy, abolitionist teaching asks a lot of teachers.