"American Grammar" | Reviewed by Bill Schwab

Public education is at the forefront in almost every community in the United States. Teaching is key to shaping values and lives. Because of the power of education, schools have become a battleground over what gets taught. Angry citizens confront school boards with critical questions: who gets instructed, how, by whom, and who decides the curriculum? Efforts to suppress freedom of speech and knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality have become so politicized and heated that the presence of security guards at school board meetings has become common.

Jarvis Givens, a Harvard University professor, has written a new history of the origins of U.S. public education that scrupulously chronicles White, Black, and Native education through the 19th century. His research reveals how the exploitation of Black and Indigenous students played a pivotal role in creating the U.S. educational enterprise as an inequitable system that favors White possession and benefit. He maintains that the current conflicts over education have their origins in structural policies governing education established by the federal government in the 1800s.

Givens weaves together the histories of White, Black, and Indigenous education. He thoroughly describes the U.S. government's efforts to determine which children would be educated and how those efforts were conducted. His research depicts the racist attitudes at the time and the motives for land dispossession of tribal lands.

Before the Civil War, it was against the law to educate Black people. The enslaved were prevented from learning how to read and write to reduce the chances that they would foment rebellion. Simultaneously, the federal government funded boarding schools where Indigenous students were forced to learn how to read and write, to become mainstreamed in White culture, and to agree to land dispossession for Western Expansion. These opposing programs shared the common goal of benefiting White people. Givens supports this juxtaposition with stories of individuals, including Margaret Douglass, who was convicted of teaching Black children, and James McDonald, a Choctaw boy who was used to advance the value of Native schooling.

"American Grammar" provides a rigorous, fresh perspective on how racism and Western expansion shaped early educational practices in the United States. This illuminating book relates how federal laws about race and land laws suppressed Black and Indigenous education to benefit White people.

At a time when schools have become a war zone in the culture wars, Givens offers a deep, reflective history that sheds light on the origins of education in the U.S. and how those beginnings continue to shape contemporary education. His book provides an essential context for today's arguments about academic freedom and equity. In recounting this past, Givens provides more honest language as the U.S. strives to build a more egalitarian educational system for all learners.

  "American Grammar" is 453 pages of meticulously written history, a powerful addition to the canon of literature on U.S. education. Many endnotes support its content, followed by a thorough index. The publisher is Harper.

About the author:  Jarvis R. Givens is a professor of education and of African and African American studies at Harvard University. He is the author of two books: "Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching" and "School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness."  Givens earned his PhD in African American studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His research has been published in several periodicals.

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