Doing to others, particularly children, what was done to us is often not a choice. It is our inheritance and we pass it along because it feels normal, not necessarily because it is healthy. In the biblical sense, such an unhealthy inheritance is described as a generational curse. Alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic abuse, and child abuse, none of which are healthy, may all become normalized. In this way, thinking our intentions are good is not enough.

In terms of generational curses, instead of “stronger,” what doesn’t kill us is usually a source of stress for us, and chronic, prolonged stress damages us, physically and psychologically. Decades of research have linked chronic stress in childhood to increased cases of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, depression and anxiety disorders, and more. Add to these concerns the breakdown in trust and the loss of vulnerability in childhood and “stronger” may be simply a euphemism for being “more callous and less humane.”

Intentions, Not Always Healthy

In North Carolina, as it relates to “a sound basic education,” good intentions alone are certainly not enough. The environments we grow up in are normalized whether they are healthy or not and that includes schools. When we simply do what feels “normal,” thinking such as “what doesn’t kill you” or “it happened to me and I’m fine,” serves to reinforce behaviors inherited from the past without examining their impact. In this way, abusive and destructive patterns can be extremely difficult to break and what is healthy can often “feel strange.” Therefore, intentions matter, and sadly, may not be as good as we assume when the results for so many of our children (after their school years) are fractured, directionless lives.

Since people’s actions and thinking constantly conform to the perceived requirements of a system, its intentions matter even more than individuals. Few today would openly argue that the intentions of Jim Crow segregation were good. Even fewer people would argue that enslavement had good intentions. Yet, for decades after they were designed, plenty of people argued as though the intentions were just that, good. They were not good; they were normalized and most people simply acquiesced over time.

None of us alive today were the original designers of our public schools, so it is important to know what was “normal” at the time that the designers did their work. After all, it was the Civil War generation and their children that took control of that design. The same thinking that enslaved, legally segregated, and violently suppressed the voting rights of Black (or any impoverished) people also was heavily involved in designing our system of schooling. Their intentions were not healthy for society then or now.

The “Sound Basic” Approach

In the North Carolina State Constitution, “the people have a right to the privilege of education, and it is the duty of the State to guard and maintain that right.” Why? One has to concede that there is a desire for a healthy society and education is the pathway. Poverty, homelessness, crime, and disease are usually minimized in a society in which its people have a healthy (humane and respectful) relationship with each other and with themselves. Therefore, a “sound basic” education is to be intentionally afforded to every child in North Carolina, for their health and the health of North Carolina.

For the health of our children, “sound” means well-founded, based on good evidence or reasons. Modern research on healthy child development takes the psychosocial and physiological growth of the child into account. When education is “sound,” its benefits are easily observed in the health of the children and of society.

As it relates to the health of the State, the functional capacity of its citizens is key. “Basic” means fundamental and in terms of education, the word therefore refers not to reading, writing, and arithmetic but to citizenship and the guarding and maintaining of our unalienable rights of “life, liberty, the enjoyment of the fruits of [our] own labor and the pursuit of happiness” laid down in our State Constitution. The “sound basic” approach to education is the protection we need.

Intentional about the Healthy Path

The “sound basic” approach to education protects the people’s unalienable rights and the “right to the privilege of education” itself. Contrast the “sound basic” approach to the historical reality of education during and immediately after the Civil War. Newly free Americans of African descent clamored for schools so much that in October of 1865, the Raleigh Journal of Freedom (the name itself an indication of the time) offered: “The Freedmen . . . ‘has got a disease for learning.’ It is a mania with him.”

The unhealthy “old social order” developed under enslavement was not simply going to fade away during post-war Reconstruction and it would not indulge the freedmen’s love for learning. The schools that the “freedmen” controlled themselves with a determination to rise above their low-caste status were often burned or forced to close. White teachers who did not seem to respect the “old social order” also were often harassed, beaten, or run out of town.

The former enslavers and their benefactors wanted to control freedmen’s schools to recapture the lost labor they had controlled and “stolen” generationally for over two centuries. They made schools unhealthy by focusing on labor. Their choice a century and a half ago was not a healthy path forward and both the children and society suffered the consequences.

At the onset of the Civil Rights era, the superiority and inferiority modeled by the racially segregated facilities and resource disparities in the schools had become unbearable. The 1954 Brown decision had the good intention to stop legal segregation and the state-sponsored harm to the development of children’s minds. Unfortunately, focusing on learned inferiority alone and its consequences for Black children while ignoring the harm being done to White children by learned superiority was not the healthy path forward.

Shortly after that Supreme Court decision, Governor William Umstead formed the North Carolina Advisory Committee on Education, led by Thomas J. Pearsall, to resist or “circumvent” Brown’s intention to desegregate. The Pearsall Plan to save our schools effectively stalled desegregation in NC until the Plan was declared unconstitutional in 1969. The segregationists however had a decade and a half to work to keep things as “normal” as possible and as desegregation was implemented, the failure to address both learned inferiority and learned superiority was still not the healthy path forward.

Nearly 70 years after Brown, the consequences of doing what is normal are apparent. In the “sound basic” sense, we are off course and not simply due to funding. Schools must “do no harm” but when many young adults finish their k-12 years having lost their love for learning, harm has been done. A “sound basic” approach to education requires care and concern for the humanity of all children and that means examining what we have inherited. Good intentions alone are not enough since good can be normal but unhealthy. Our schools therefore must not simply repeat what was done in the past but instead they must be intentional about choosing the healthy path for our children and our society.

In Part III, we look at the “Pledge to All Children” needed to make “healthy” the norm for our schools.
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View Part 1: Facing Our Inheritance – What Is Humanizing Education?