In his influential 1933 book The Mis-Education of the Negro, Black American historian and educator Carter G. Woodson argues that American schools and universities failed to meaningfully educate Black students during the decades following the Civil War. Like many scholars and activists today, Woodson sees racial inequities in educational access and achievement as a reflection of the U.S. education system’s bias in favor of white people and against Black people. In Woodson’s time, teachers and curricula in segregated Black schools emphasized white history, art, and literature while minimizing or outright ignoring non-white people’s achievements. Meanwhile, most teachers asked their students to simply memorize information, rather than teaching them to think critically about their own lives and society. As a result, Woodson thinks, the more formal education that Black people received, the less capable they were of actually making original contributions to society. Woodson concludes that in order to genuinely educate Black students, the early 20th-century American education system needs to transform at all levels. Scholars need to understand Black students’ lives and capabilities, then develop a curriculum for them that helps them fulfill their potential, and finally implement this curriculum in American schools. Through this proposal, Woodson argues that any education system must connect with its students’ lived experience in order to be effective, which means helping students build the knowledge, morals, and skills that they need to live fulfilling lives.
Woodson’s central argument is that, at all levels, the U.S. education system fails to educate Black students because it offers them a biased curriculum taught from a white supremacist perspective. This curriculum emphasizes European history, art, and scientific achievement, while virtually ignoring the rest of the world. Moreover, it is explicitly racist—teachers and textbooks openly proclaim that white people are biologically and culturally inferior to non-white people. This gives Black students the false impression that their people have never achieved anything significant and never will. According to Woodson, this harms Black students’ self-esteem and prevents them from developing their abilities and pursuing their dreams. Meanwhile, the curriculum minimizes and rationalizes Black people’s suffering. For instance, students are asked to debate the morality of slavery, which history classes suggest was actually good for Black people. Woodson concludes that these misguided lessons help white people justify subjugating Black people and convince Black people that they naturally deserve to be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The school system also wastes Black students’ talent because it sees their potential contributions to society as unimportant. For instance, Woodson notes that schools seldom invest in helping Black writers, musicians, and actors develop their talent because they assume that Black people are naturally meant to create amateur art for a popular audience, as opposed to creatively sophisticated high art (which is associated with white artists and audiences). This means that Black students end up losing out on the resources they need to develop as artists and produce respectable high art.
Woodson sees a misguided theory of education at the root of the U.S. school and university system’s problems: the system views education as delivering information to students or forcibly transforming them, rather than helping them develop their own innate abilities. This assumption explains why so many schools teach Black students the same curriculum as white students: rather than adapting lessons to their students, they assume that all children will benefit in the same way from learning the same set of facts. For instance, one school administrator tells Woodson that building a university for Black students just requires hiring any group of men with PhDs in the right subjects. Because he assumes that all students learn in the same way, this administrator thinks that anyone with a PhD can effectively teach any student. More fundamentally, he assumes that PhDs are interchangeable, and education just means memorizing a large set of information. But Woodson disagrees: he thinks that education is really about learning to think in a new way, which means that effective instructors have to adapt to their students. In contrast to the mis-education system’s narrow view of learning as the accumulation of knowledge, Woodson argues, true education is about developing students’ abilities—especially their ability to think critically and independently—so that they can effectively navigate the challenges they’ll face later on in life.
To fulfill his dream of providing Black Americans with a true education, Woodson proposes substantially reforming the existing school system. He wants to rewrite the curriculum, retrain teachers, and create new fields of study that center Black people’s history and experiences, without erasing white people’s. Most importantly, Woodson wants to rework the curriculum in order to teach Black students about their own community’s achievements, history, and potential. To make this possible, he argues, scholars must undertake a “careful study of the Negro himself and the life which he is forced to lead.” In other words, researchers have to start viewing African and Black American history, art, and culture as serious scholarly subjects. Similarly, Woodson argues that teachers must be trained to help develop their students’ minds, rather than just reciting information to them. Specifically, Woodson argues that teachers must make strong personal connections in the Black community and empathize with their students.
Although he proposes wide-ranging changes to the American education system, Woodson does not plan to tear it down entirely: rather, he wants to build on existing institutional structures in order to teach students the right lessons. Similarly, he doesn’t think that Black people should only learn about Black history, art, and literature: rather, he thinks it’s important for their curriculum to cover the whole range of human endeavor and experience, but specifically connect these achievements to students’ specific life contexts. Woodson dedicated his life to pursuing this vision of a new education system, especially by starting the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and founding Black History Month, which remains his most well-known legacy.
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Racism and Education Quotes in The Mis-Education of the Negro
It is merely a matter of exercising common sense in approaching people through their environment in order to deal with conditions as they are rather than as you would like to see them or imagine that they are. There may be a difference in method of attack, but the principle remains the same.
“Highly educated” Negroes denounce persons who advocate for the Negro a sort of education different in some respects from that now given the white man. Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination. They are anxious to have everything the white man has even if it is harmful.
The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples. For example, the philosophy and ethics resulting from our educational system have justified slavery, peonage, segregation, and lynching. The oppressor has the right to exploit, to handicap, and to kill the oppressed. Negroes daily educated in the tenets of such a religion of the strong have accepted the status of the weak as divinely ordained, and during the last three generations of their nominal freedom they have done practically nothing to change it. Their pouting and resolutions indulged in by a few of the race have been of little avail.
When a Negro has finished his education in our schools, then, he has been equipped to begin the life of an Americanized or Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain. He goes forth to play his part in life, but he must be both social and bisocial at the same time. While he is a part of the body politic, he is in addition to this a member of a particular race to which he must restrict himself in all matters social. While serving his country he must serve within a special group. While being a good American, he must above all things be a “good Negro”; and to perform this definite function he must learn to stay in a “Negro’s place.”
These earnest workers, however, had more enthusiasm than knowledge. They did not understand the task before them. This undertaking, too, was more of an effort toward social uplift than actual education. Their aim was to transform the Negroes, not to develop them.
With “mis-educated Negroes” in control themselves, however, it is doubtful that the system would be very much different from what it is or that it would rapidly undergo change. The Negroes thus placed in charge would be the products of the same system and would show no more conception of the task at hand than do the whites who have educated them and shaped their minds as they would have them function. Negro educators of today may have more sympathy and interest in the race than the whites now exploiting Negro institutions as educators, but the former have no more vision than their competitors. Taught from books of the same bias, trained by Caucasians of the same prejudices or by Negroes of enslaved minds, one generation of Negro teachers after another have served for no higher purpose than to do what they are told to do. In other words, a Negro teacher instructing Negro children is in many respects a white teacher thus engaged, for the program in each case is about the same.
Real education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better, but the instruction so far given Negroes in colleges and universities has worked to the contrary.
The so-called education of Negro college graduates leads them to throw away opportunities which they have and to go in quest of those which they do not find.
Some one recently inquired as to why the religious schools do not teach the people how to tolerate differences of opinion and to cooperate for the common good. This, however, is the thing which these institutions have refused to do. Religious schools have been established, but they are considered necessary to supply workers for denominational outposts and to keep alive the sectarian bias by which the Baptists hope to outstrip the Methodists or the latter the former. No teacher in one of these schools has advanced a single thought which has become a working principle in Christendom, and not one of these centres is worthy of the name of a school of theology.
This minister had given no attention to the religious background of the Negroes to whom he was trying to preach. He knew nothing of their spiritual endowment and their religious experience as influenced by their traditions and environment in which the religion of the Negro has developed and expressed itself. He did not seem to know anything about their present situation. These honest people, therefore, knew nothing additional when he had finished his discourse. As one communicant pointed out, their wants had not been supplied, and they wondered where they might go to hear a word which had some bearing upon the life which they had to live.
These rewriters of history fearlessly contended that slavery was a benevolent institution; the masters loved their slaves and treated them humanely; the abolitionists meddled with the institution which the masters eventually would have modified; the Civil War brought about by “fanatics” like William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown was unnecessary; it was a mistake to make the Negro a citizen, for he merely became worse off by incurring the displeasure of the master class that will never tolerate him as an equal; and the Negro must live in this country in a state of recognized inferiority.
If the Negro is to be elevated he must be educated in the sense of being developed from what he is, and the public must be so enlightened as to think of the Negro as a man. Furthermore, no one can be thoroughly educated until he learns as much about the Negro as he knows about other people.
Why should the Negro writer seek a theme abroad when he has the greatest of all at home?
The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.
Can you expect teachers to revolutionize the social order for the good of the community? Indeed we must expect this very thing. The educational system of a country is worthless unless it accomplishes this task. Men of scholarship and consequently of prophetic insight must show us the right way and lead us into the light which shines brighter and brighter.
We should not close any accredited Negro colleges or universities, but we should reconstruct the whole system. We should not eliminate many of the courses now being offered, but we should secure men of vision to give them from the point of view of the people to be served. We should not spend less money for the higher education of the Negro, but should redefine higher education as preparation to think and work out a program to serve the lowly rather than to live as an aristocrat.
To educate the Negro we must find out exactly what his background is, what he is today, what his possibilities are, and how to begin with him as he is and make him a better individual of the kind that he is. Instead of cramming the Negro’s mind with what others have shown that they can do, we should develop his latent powers that he may perform in society a part of which others are not capable.
Right in the heart of the highly educated Negro section of Washington, too, is a restaurant catering through the front door exclusively to the white business men, who must live in the Negroes’ section to supply them with the necessities of life, and catering at the same time through the back door to numbers of Negroes who pile into that dingy room to purchase whatever may be thrown at them. Yet less than two blocks away are several Negroes running cafés where they can be served for the same amount and under desirable circumstances. Negroes who do this, we say, do not have the proper attitude toward life and its problems, and for that reason we do not take up time with them. They do not belong to our community. The traducers of the race, however, are guiding these people the wrong way. Why do not the “educated” Negroes change their course by identifying themselves with the masses?
The Negro can be made proud of his past only by approaching it scientifically himself and giving his own story to the world. What others have written about the Negro during the last three centuries has been mainly for the purpose of bringing him where he is today and holding him there.
