What Is Humanizing Education? Part 1: Facing Our Inheritance – GDN Exclusive

Demetrius Haddock

Consider this: None of the people alive at the time of the Civil War designed the system of enslavement. They were born into it and shaped by it. By 1865, nearly three-quarters of a million of their lives were taken over something they never created. What that generation inherited cost many of them their lives.

Most of the Civil Rights workers of the 1950s and 60s who put an end to legal segregation were likewise born into and shaped by a system that they did not create. They inherited the problems of previous generations and that inheritance also cost many lives along the way. The learned superiority that fed legal segregation also maintained enslavement and ultimately fueled the Civil War.

Designed after the Civil War in the echo of enslavement and alongside legal segregation, our public school model is linked to both dehumanizing systems. Considering the many child protective laws and agencies developed over the last century, it is safe to suggest that children were not viewed and treated with the highest regard during the time that public schools were formed. Our inheritance from this past suggests that developing children and promoting their equality were not important. We need to examine this inheritance closely and not assume past intentions were the same as today.

The Problem With Our Inheritance

Nearly 70 years since the two groups, Black and White, were placed together in the same buildings, the issue of superiority, learned under both enslavement and Jim Crow legal segregation, is still with us.  Consider that when 10-year-old “Izzy” Tichenor took her own life recently, learned superiority, while not named, was cited in the form of “racial bullying.” While “Izzy’s” school was in Utah, schools in North Carolina also have problems with learned superiority to Black students.

At Panther Creek High School in Wake County, a video recently appeared showing a student being held down and handcuffed by an officer with a second man pressing his knee on his neck. A few weeks ago, in Johnson County, 15-year-old Brooklyn Edwards, a sophomore at Princeton High, spoke before their Board of Education about White students calling her “the n-word” and a “monkey” and being told on numerous occasions to “pick cotton” and “kill yourself.” In her comments, she referenced the “flag incident” that occurred a few weeks prior. Her mother eventually had to pull her from the school to free her from the cruel, degrading treatment and, since she had begun “hurting herself,” to prevent a similar fate as 10-year-old “Izzy.”

Locally in Cumberland County, allegations circulated in 2018 against Mac Williams Middle School teacher James Cochran. When interviewed, the mother of the student involved in the incident stated, “From my understanding, he walked up to my son, grabbed him by the arm and told him he wanted to smash his head into a brick and set him on fire.” These comments are startlingly reminiscent of the impulse to lynch, a horrific reality in American history. The mother added that her son was also “spat on” and called “the n-word.”

A few days later, a second incident involving Cochran surfaced, this time with a video recording of him loudly mocking, physically harassing, and intimidatingly cornering a 13-year-old Black student during class. Was he innocent of the first allegations? Why was he back in the classroom? While the official narrative, and certainly the hope, is about inclusiveness, a different picture can be seen involving the response to the mistreatment of Black children. The student said in an interview, “It made me feel like teachers don’t care about students and there’s no protection at school.”

Schools Are Supposed To Do No Harm

All children are created equal and all means all. Our schools must magnify that equality to be truly humanizing. Yet, we have inherited these schools from a past shaped by inequality (superiority and inferiority). We typically assume the best about these schools. For example, the Cumberland County Schools Student Code of Conduct has been a guiding document for many years. Most would simply accept it as “the way we have always done things.” Yet, in recent pre-pandemic years, nearly 70% of short-term suspensions were for Black children. Is such a disparity worthy of open examination or is it simply something to explain away?

The main focus of student conduct in most school districts is on behavioral infractions and punitive consequences. This focus often contributes to an unwelcoming or even uncaring school environment that is often linked to the judicial system. With language that is vague and “open to wide interpretations,” student codes of conduct are thus vulnerable to bias and disparate treatment of children. Our society has a problem with disparate treatment so it is not a stretch that our schools would too.

Early in 2021, the Community Interagency Council for Quality Education (CICQuE), a local council of representatives from various Cumberland County community organizations, composed recommendations and a memo about changes to the local student code. In its memo, CICQuE offered, “No factors such as race or gender should influence or determine a student’s value or ability to maintain dignity” in school.

More than anything else, our schools must be clear about what it means to “do no harm” while expressing care and concern for the humanity of all children and youth. Asking “what happened” to children and youth, instead of “what’s wrong” with them, is a key shift in approach that humanizes them and their experiences. When the question “what’s wrong” is asked, it is too easily answered by the stereotypes and prejudices of learned superiority that suggest being Black is what’s wrong.

None of us can say for certain what is in another person’s heart but how that person responds or fails to respond to matters is an indicator. All children are created equal, dependent, and vulnerable. We must protect the psychological development of them all and that means our schools cannot permit or teach superiority and inferiority. They must protect and teach, not the sameness, but the equality of children.

In Part II, we examine more closely why “Good Intentions Alone Are Not Enough” to shift the focus of our inheritance.

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