Education for Liberation: Race, Class, Gender, and the History of Education

Touted as the gateway to a better life, schools have been the focal point of debates over the process of Americanization, the role of women in U.S. society, and the place of people of color in the United States throughout its history. Groups historically denied access to the full benefits of first-class citizenship in the United States viewed schools as the pathway to accessing the American dream. While disenfranchised groups often tried to use education as a form of liberation from grueling farm or factory labor, the nation's elite often viewed schools as places that would reinscribe the dominant society's race, class, and gender roles, perhaps creating an even more efficient working class and peaceful domestic sphere. The four works examined here focus primarily on the efforts of immigrants, African Americans, and women to use education to broaden their own opportunities and pry open the door to full citizenship rights. For most of these groups, liberation did not denote an overturning of the system, but rather their inclusion within it.

In Torches of Light, Ann Short Chirhart uses the stories of white and black Georgia teachers from the 1920s through the 1940s to examine the role played by educators in preparing Georgians for the coming of the modern South. Rural schoolteachers, tied to their communities by familial and religious bonds, used their roles as educators to aid rural Southerners in the transition to a modern society by teaching them the skills necessary to compete in a modern liberal state. Black and white schoolteachers' local roots enabled them to help rural schoolchildren from farming families adjust to a society that was moving away from localism and cotton culture toward one based upon individual accomplishment and occupation. The work of Georgia educators, Chirhart asserts, was central to Georgia's transformation into a modern state between 1910 and 1950.

In addition to the role that they played in aiding rural Georgians in the transition to a modern society, Georgia schoolteachers were able to fashion a more public and professional role for themselves by taking advantage of federal and national reforms that focused on professionalizing the teaching force through specialized courses in education and the standardization of teaching certification. For black women, who were accustomed to working outside the home, the professionalization of teaching offered them a pathway out of backbreaking field labor, a way to garner respect in their communities, and, more importantly, a tool for challenging white supremacy. Chirhart argues that once the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People came under withering attack in the mid-1940s and began to close chapters throughout the state, black educators, as members of the Georgia Teachers and Education Association, became the "leading civil rights advocacy group" of the 1940s (2). In Torches of Light, black teachers formed the vanguard of the civil rights movement, enabling other African Americans to assert rights that would help them to move into the modern age.

For white women in Georgia, teaching also offered a respectable form of employment outside the home and an opportunity to avoid farm labor. In particular, Chirhart asserts, white women used teaching to expand the public role of the Southern lady, whose labors were supposed to be limited to the household. As black and white women carved out a role...