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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Mis-Education of the Negro, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism and Education
Mis-Education as Social Control
Failures of Black Leadership
Business and Economic Development
Summary
Analysis
In this chapter, Woodson looks at how educators’ mistakes contributed to the mis-education of Black Americans after the Civil War. Though well-intentioned, missionaries and educators generally wanted to “transform the Negroes, not to develop them.” In other words, they used the standard curriculum taught in white schools, without taking their students’ specific experiences or perspectives into account.
Just like Woodson in his early days as an educator, other teachers and missionaries naïvely assume that education means imposing knowledge and discipline on students, rather than understanding and developing their specific skills. In part, this is because of the racist idea that many Black people in the 1930s are poor because there is something wrong with them that needs to be changed. Instead, as Woodson suggests, the truth is that many Black people are poor because they didn’t get the chance to develop and apply their inherent talents.
Themes
The standard curriculum teaches that white people are physically superior, inhabit more important places, and have made all significant historical achievements in math and science. Schools teach Black students that their own dialect of English is incorrect. Moreover, they focus on European languages, literature, and art, while ignoring African and Asian people’s great achievements. Law schools teach Black students that their people are inherently criminal and therefore deserve harsher punishments, while medical schools tell Black students that their people are physically inferior because they suffer higher rates of disease. The curriculum presents history as the story of white Europeans’ achievements while ignoring Africans’.
Students often think of the school curriculum as a collection of objective facts, but Woodson points out that the way these facts are organized matters. By only teaching students about white people’s accomplishments, the U.S. school system distorts history and encourages students to accept a racial hierarchy in which some lives matter more than others. In this way, the school curriculum is actually designed to subjugate Black students. Of course, Woodson’s observation also implies that it would be possible to teach students a different curriculum—one in which white, Black, and other people’s achievements are all taught in a balanced way.
Themes
In following the official curriculum, even well-intentioned educators teach their Black students to view themselves as inferior to white people. Black educators and community leaders have little power to change the curriculum, so as a result, it is controlled by white people. Moreover, “educated” Black people are products of this school system, so they are ill-equipped to change it in the first place. In schools, they learn to behave like white people, but they’re also taught that they will never rise to the level of white people. This contradiction allows the system to economically exploit and politically oppress educated Black people—who also feel like they have to defend this system.
The structural problems with U.S. education are fundamentally responsible for teachers’, administrators’, and “educated” Black people’s personal racial biases. The biased curriculum encourages teachers to believe that their Black students have no real potential. Therefore, it suggests that they should transform these students into something else—and make them resemble white students—rather than developing their innate talents and interests. On the other hand, this curriculum also imposes racist ideas on everyone who goes through the school system, and therefore it discourages educated people from reforming it. This is why Woodson thinks that reforming the curriculum and building Black-owned educational institutions is crucial to addressing the social and economic inequality between white and Black Americans.
Themes
