From the point of view of the U.S. nation-state, education has always been a hegemonic means to control knowledge, to calibrate unequal forms of citizenship, and to promote the social reproduction of power. Yet as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903, "education among all kinds of men [sic] always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men [sic] strive to know." Drawing inspiration from the 1964 Freedom School Curriculum and spanning from enslavement to emancipation to the long civil rights movement, this course explores how people of African descent in the United States, and black women in particular, have used education to empower themselves, produce social change, and redefine the terms under which change may occur. |