Getting Schooled: A Curriculum of Lying, Choking, and Dying

• In Event: Black Lives Matter in U.S. Schools: Race, Education, and Resistance

Abstract

One of the central tenets we teach our children is a curriculum of lying, choking, and dying, an understanding that is as deeply unfortunate as it is longstanding. Although this may seem to be a deeply pessimistic, overstated, or biased perspective, as this proposed paper documents, such a characterization of US curriculum at the onset of this millennia is indeed metaphorically and literally the case. For example, how we teach pedagogy to future educators and how teachers often attend to their students is through lesson plans with measurable goals and objectives. Seemingly common sense on its surface, these are tools intentionally created toward specific eugenics ends by Franklin Bobbitt, a man who is a father of US education and a proud, self-avowed eugenicist (e.g., Bobbitt, 1909). This metaphorical choking of educational possibilities and material killing of people of color are both forms of curriculum, educational ways of being, knowing, and doing.
Methodologically, this an historical and contemporary examination of curricular forms that consider what is and has always been in the United States, a curriculum of lying, choking, and dying. Part of what makes this curriculum so pernicious is its interconnective tissue, the tendons and ligaments of violence that stretch between classrooms and communities. This is because, as universally normalized as this brutality is conceptualized and expressed, its direction is focused at children, youth, and adults of color. As much as it takes a village to raise children, it takes that same village at least an equal amount of time and effort to engender aggression as normal and brutal selective consequences as natural outcomes.
There are generations of work dedicated to illuminating the viscera of violence in education (e.g., Churchill, 2004; Cooper, 1892; Morris, 2016; Watkins, 2001). Rather than seeking to posit that curricula of violence is somehow either novel or otherwise overlooked, this paper is conceived as but one condensed set of connections that operates at a given layer of scale, one of many possible perspectives and levels of analysis, to consider intersections of curriculum, race, and (in)justice. Specifically, this paper attends to how curricular understandings indicate actions as they convey content and normalize violence as they slam into Brown and Black bodies. Here I present how a curriculum of lying in schools is linked to a curriculum of choking of self, both of which are inexorably interconnected to a curriculum of dying in the streets. This lying, choking, and dying is significant because it acts as a crushing feedback loop that gains power as each iteration flips recursively back on itself, successive generations coming to understand and accept the normalcy of such violence and, in turn, reproduce the norms and values that allow its perpetuation.

Author

• Walter S. Gershon, Rowan University
  Presenting Author