Woodson published The Mis-education of the Negro in 1933. Naming “Mis-education”: A conceptual breakthrough in black educational criticismĬarter G. This body of educational theory disrupted fundamental myths shaping human sociality. The educational criticism of black people was fundamentally counterhegemonic in its assertion that they were rational subjects, and because the ideas embedded within it challenged the racial hierarchy of slavery and then Jim Crow. Mining this language provides revelatory insight about the intricacies of black life in the social phenomena of education and study, a heritage comprising black people’s experience in education as well as their interpretations of said experiences.īlack educational criticism, often referred to as black educational thought, was part and parcel of fugitive pedagogy, providing theories of education and counter analyses of the American School from below. A way of speaking and knowing emerged from the interstices of black people’s alienation within and resistance to the American School. Their pursuit of language and understanding produced a distinct body of educational criticism, one that analysed the relationship between education and black life and exposed how education factored into black people’s suffering as well as their struggle for freedom and justice. Sylvia Wynter, ‘Race and our biocentric belief system’ (2000)īlack Americans struggled with how to talk and think about the education predicament they found themselves in and the systems of knowledge that structured their realities. So the question that we have been running away from is the body of knowledge in the university and schools itself.

“Woodson … looked at the entire educational system and he said that it is set up in such a way as to motivate white students by telling them that they had done everything and to de-motivate black students by telling them that they had done nothing.

Woodson embodied, draws our attention to the ways in which black educators have challenged the epistemological antiblackness through which some school curricula have been codified. His book, and the tradition of black educational thought that Carter G. Givens excavates a subversive tradition of African American and diasporic educational thought that contested conventional framings of knowledge within the American curriculum. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press). Givens’ new book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Below we publish an extract from Jarvis R.

Fugitive Pedagogy by Jarvis R. Givens