1A Best Of: Who Gets To Decide What School Means For Students?
Jan 22, 2026
Eve L. Ewing, a writer and professor at the University of Chicago, shares insights from her work on race and education. She discusses how schools actively shape and normalize racial hierarchies rather than just reflect them. Ewing questions the purpose of schooling and explores the contrasting aims of nurturing belonging versus maintaining the status quo. She highlights historical injustices in education and advocates for community-led efforts to transform schools into spaces of empowerment and equity.
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Schools As Laboratories Of Racial Order
- Schools have actively shaped and normalized racial hierarchies rather than merely reflecting them.
- Eve L. Ewing argues schools served as laboratories to hone and maintain racial order in the U.S.
Education Justified Theft And Enslavement
- Early U.S. education aimed to justify land theft and slavery by dehumanizing Black and Native people.
- That ideological work made exclusion and dispossession feel normal and necessary for the republic.
Three Pillars Shaping School Racism
- Three pillars uphold racial hierarchy in schools: intellectual inferiority, discipline, and economic subjugation.
- These pillars shape testing, punishment, and curricula that prepare marginalized students for subordinate roles.
