Race, Power, and the Making of America's Schools

Nov 19, 2025

Jarvis Givens, a Harvard education professor and author specializing in race and education, explores the interconnected histories of Native and Black education in the U.S. He argues that public schooling is rooted in Native land dispossession and the economic engine of slavery. Givens introduces the concept of 'American Grammar,' highlighting how race, power, and knowledge are embedded in today's educational structures. He emphasizes the need for nuanced historical understanding to address current inequities and shape justice-oriented educational solutions.

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INSIGHT

Schooling Built On Dispossession

Early U.S. schooling developed through and because of Native land dispossession and the capital generated by slavery.
This means Black and Native people were central to schooling's development, not merely excluded from it.

INSIGHT

Curriculum Encoded Racial Roles

Curricula and textbooks embedded racial and settler-colonial assumptions from the start, including math problems about property and enslaved people.
These lessons socialized white students for roles as landowners and slaveowners and reinforced racial hierarchies.

INSIGHT

White Identity Formed Through Schooling

White students learned racial narratives and policies even when Black and Native peers were absent from classrooms.
Schooling formed white identities relationally, linking curriculum to broader political economy of race.

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Looking back at the early history of U.S. education, Harvard Professor Jarvis Givens says we’ve long told the story in fragments: Native education in one lane, Black education in another, and the rise of white common schools somewhere else. But in his latest research, he shows just how deeply interconnected these histories actually are, particularly how the development of public schools was entangled with Native land dispossession and the economic engine of slavery. This history is the focus of his new book, American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation.

“The reality is that it's not that Black and Native people were not included in the project of American school development, because public schooling in the U.S. was actually developed over and through Native and Black people's dispossession through their subjugation,” Givens says. “It's Native land loss and it's the kind of capital generated from race-based slavery that's really driving the economic development of the nation and also its internal institutions, schooling in particular.”

Givens introduces the idea of an “American Grammar,” a framework in which race, power, and knowledge were built into the structure of schooling itself. That grammar hasn’t disappeared, he says, noting how today’s debates over curriculum, representation, and educational justice reflect it.

“If we're not being clear and if we're not being as nuanced and detailed as possible in how we're naming how we got to this place, then we can allow ourselves to work with faulty assumptions or faulty understandings about this history that then come to inform the solutions we try to create,” Givens says. “And that's one of the major issues I think that we're up against. How we narrate the past and how we narrate injustice has direct implications for how we go about bringing about justice in the context of schools.”

In this EdCast, Givens discusses what it means to rethink what we believe we know about the origins of American education and what becomes possible when we finally reckon with the full story.