A Reflection on American Education by Joselyne Ruiz Zuniga
Mental colonization is something I’ve been thinking a lot about these past two years. After a semester dedicated to unpacking The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Friere and the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Schools, I came to the realization that most of our American decentralized school systems exclude and censor Black, Indigenous, Queer, low income and POC narratives in curriculum. For example, between the 1950s - 1960’s Black classrooms in Mississippi were legally prohibited from holding any discussion on current events–the civil rights movement at the time–and the history of African and African American people. This censorship and sanitization of curriculum and classroom dialogue avoided any type of critical discussion that contextualized the Black experience in America. In the state of Mississippi, this white supremacist surveillance was sustained through state policy and local government–predominantly by governor Ross Robert Barnett. However, this story of evident information suppression and political disenfranchisement via white supremacy is not unique to Mississippi or the 1960’s.
In 2007 Tom Horne, the superintendent of Arizona, declared a very successful Mexican-American Studies curriculum at Tucson Magnet High School to be “Anti-American”. After these accusations, an independent audit was held by the state of Arizona on the Mexican-American studies program. The results showed that the pedagogy and curriculum content effectively reduced the achievement gap by increasing student retention, improving Arizona standardized test scores and increasing graduation rates to a whopping 93% where 85% of the graduating students were going to college. According to the documentary Precious Knowledge, before the implementation of Mexican-American studies in the Tucson Unified School District, more than 50% of the Mexican-American/Chicano student population was dropping out. On a much larger scale, a 2000 education department report showed that the Mexican-American student population made up the highest dropout rate of any other minority group in America.
What baffles me is that this nation constantly talks about closing the achievement gap, yet when a solution was developed by Tucson Magnet School teachers, Jose Gonzales and Curtis Acosta, the culturally relative pedagogy and the curriculum was demonized and banned. Tom Horne’s white supremacist rhetoric successfully passed House Bill 2281 in 2010. Unsurprisingly, this bill was part of several disenfranchising anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican policies that had developed in Arizona due to white supremacist race and power anxieties. Fundamentally, House Bill 2281 banned all Ethnic Studies and actively targeted Mexican-American studies programs. This bill also banned The Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Frier, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America history book, The Devil's Highway: A True Story Book by Luis Alberto Urrea and Shakespeare’s The Tempest among many other BIPOC and Queer inclusive pieces of literature or history books.
As Curtis Acosta beautifully stated in his article, Dangerous Minds In Tucson: The Banning of Mexican American Studies and Critical Thinking In Arizona, “What type of critical thinking is dangerous enough to require surveillance by Arizona state officials, legislation and ultimately state takeover, erasure, and destruction of effective educational spaces?” These historic happenings have made a few things clear. The first is that education is political. Any academic scholar that states otherwise is evidently working for the status quo and supremacist agenda. When the state chooses to teach with history books that exclude, censor, and sanitize the Black, Indigenous, Queer, low income, and POC narrative, the state is choosing to use schools as places to reproduce and sustain white nationalist and supremacist ideologies. The second realization has been that the lack of quality education and culturally relative pedagogy and curriculum in low-income communities is not an accident. White supremacist powers want our education to continue to be decontextualized from our disenfranchised and oppressed realities. Essentially, when education lacks contextualization to the lived experiences of the students, students lose interest in academia and as a result, do not come to terms with education being a tool of liberation. However, when critical, relevant, and contextualized pedagogy and curriculum is used, students are empowered to become active political actors in their community and state government. This political empowerment happens because students begin to critically understand how the systems around them have deprived them rather than protect them. Political empowerment and the collective unity of the Queer, low-income and BIPOC community is what white supremacist powers are afraid of.
I’ll leave you with a quote by my favorite author, Paulo Freire, “Education... is the practice of freedom, the means by which people deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.” Sustainable education is an education of liberation. One that inspires youth to liberate themselves and others by becoming the leaders of liberation in different sectors of America. Empower the Queer, low-income and BIPOC youth around you to see the beauty in putting education in action. Inspire them to embody praxis. Let’s work together to decolonize the minds of our youth by decolonizing the pedagogy and curriculum in our decentralized education systems.
Sources:
Acosta, Curtis (2014) "Dangerous Minds In Tucson: The Banning of Mexican American Studies and Critical Thinking In Arizona," Journal of Educational Controversy: Vol. 8 : No. 1 , Article 9. Available at: https://cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol8/iss1/9
Donald, Brooke. “Stanford study suggests academic Benefits to ethnic Studies Courses”. Stanford News. (2016) Accessed February 20, 2020.
Front Page of the Week. Newspaper. When Race Tensions Became Race Strife, Governor Barnett On Civil Rights. [Cambridge Mississippi.] 1963. Pg 6.
HOUSE BILL 2281 AN ACT AMENDING TITLE 15, CHAPTER 1, ARTICLE 1, ARIZONA REVISED STATUTES, BY ADDING SECTIONS 15-111 AND 15-112; AMENDING SECTION 15-843, ARIZONA REVISED STATUTES; RELATING TO SCHOOL CURRICULUM.
Press, Associated. “Arizona Judge Declares Ban on Ethnic Studies Unconstitutional.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 28 Dec. 2017, www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/arizona-judge-declares-ban-ethnic-studies-unconstitutional-n833126.
“Precious Knowledge.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/precious-knowledge/.
Sturkey William. (2017). “The 1964 Mississippi Freedom schools”. History Now. http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/403/The-1964-Mississippi-Freedom-Schools
Vatos, Dos. “Watch Precious Knowledge Online: Vimeo On Demand.” Vimeo, 12 July 2020, vimeo.com/ondemand/preciousknowledge.
