Minds stayed on freedom: politics and pedagogy in the African American freedom struggle

Radical Teacher, Spring, 2004 by Daniel Perlstein

Calls for schools to build on children's interests, promote active problem-solving, and connect learning to life are commonplace in American discussions of education. Contemporary constructivism (2) is but the most recent incarnation of a discourse that has echoed through American educational reform since the days of the common school movement and that achieved its quintessential expression in the progressive era a century ago. Anticipating whole-language theorists, common school reformer Horace Mann argued that literacy instruction which engaged students in reading meaningful texts would build upon "the life, the zest, the eagerness with which all children ... seek for real objects." By contrast, Mann argued, the "abcderian approach" of "conservative" schoolmasters who scolded or whipped students into sounding out "ba be bi bo bu" and hundreds of other "senseless particles" banished children "from this world into the realms of vacuity." (3) Echoing Mann, philosopher John Dewey celebrated the intensely active nature of children's learning and condemned those who reduced schooling to students' passive absorption of information.

The enduring appeal of progressive pedagogy owes much to the way it resonates with widely held American values, and in particular with the liberal democratic political synthesis of individual autonomy and collective self-determination. And yet, progressive education presumes as well as fosters a democratic environment, and critics have struggled to reconcile its claims with reservations about its appropriateness for poor and minority students. The liberal ideal of encouraging "children to become autonomous.... in the classroom setting without having arbitrary, outside standards forced upon them," as Lisa Delpit has argued, may well serve the interests of privileged students much better than of children who have not already internalized "the culture of power." (4)

Delpit follows in a long line of African American educators and intellectuals who have charged that in imagining meaning-making as the relatively painless and unconstrained exploration of a relatively benign environment, progressive educators mistakenly generalize from white experience. Still, at times, Black intellectuals and activists have been persuaded that democratic elements in American life and/or the Black community were overcoming the brutalizing impact of racial exclusion and oppression. At those moments, Black scholars and educators have gambled that the democratic potential of progressive pedagogy outweighed the special difficulties Black children confronted as they experienced a racist environment organized to dehumanize them.

To illuminate how assessments of the nature and direction of race relations have shaped support for progressive pedagogy for disenfranchised youth, this article traces the evolution of political and educational ideas in the African American civil tights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when activists working in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party developed, abandoned, recreated, and abandoned again open-ended, progressive pedagogical approaches to the study of social and political life. A commitment to the simultaneous fostering of personal and social transformation led both groups to devote considerable attention to the creation of alternative schools for Black children; and the changing pedagogical choices that activists made reflected the evolving politics of the African American freedom struggle

SNCC AND PROGRESSIVE PEDAGOGY

A new politics, infused with pedagogy, emerged at the outset of the 1960s, a politics announced by civil rights activists' lunch counter sit-ins and represented organizationally by the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Like the more established civil rights organizations, SNCC sought to achieve racial integration and to win equality for African Americans. In addition to protesting racial injustice, however, the young activists centered around SNCC sought to live their beliefs. The sit-ins derived their power from this ability of protesters to reconstitute the meaning of their own humanity, while they also demanded the abolition of unjust laws. Although they "wanted to end segregation, discrimination, and white supremacy," SNCC's Charley Cobb made clear, "the core of our efforts was the belief that Black people had to make decisions about and take charge of the things controlling their lives.... Most of us organizing soon learned that our main challenge was getting Black people to ... redefine themselves." (5) This commitment to a politics of self-discovery, self-expression, and self-determination imbued SNCC's work with pedagogical concerns.

Among SNCC's core programs was the establishment of a network of "freedom schools," as part of its 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer. Charlie Cobb, who first proposed their creation, deemed Negro education in Mississippi the worst in the nation. He and other SNCC activists believed that Black consciousness was distorted by segregation, but they were also convinced that Blacks might draw from their experience an understanding of the nature and promise of American society. Organizers' faith in students' ability to make sense of their world--their faith that American society was not irretrievably alien to students--inspired them to embrace a student-centered curriculum. "The value of the Freedom School," volunteer teachers were reminded, "will derive from what the teachers are able to elicit from the students in terms of comprehension and expression of their experiences." (6)