American Grammar - by Jarvis R Givens (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A new history of US education through the nineteenth century that rigorously accounts for Black, Native, and white experiences; a story that exposes the idea of American education as "the great equalizer" to not only be a lie, but also a myth that reproduces past harms.

Education is the epicenter of every community in the United States. Indeed, few institutions are as pivotal in shaping our lives and values than public schools. Yet the nature of schooling has become highly politicized, placing its true colors on full display--a battleground where clashes over free speech and book bans abound, and where the suppression of knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality have taken center stage. Political forces are waging a war on academic freedom, raising serious questions. What gets taught, how, by whom, and who gets to decide? Yet, how might our perception of this reality shift when we recognize such battles as expressions of a relationship between race, power, and schooling as old as the country itself?

Access and equity in public education have long been discussed and attempts to address the educational debts owed to historically oppressed groups have taken the form of modern innovations and promises of future improvement. Yet the past plays an equally significant role in structuring our present reality--and in the case of our education system, there is a dark, unexamined history that continues to influence how schools forge our world.

Harvard University professor Jarvis R. Givens, an expert in the fields of American Educational History and African American Studies, draws on his own personal experiences and academic expertise to unveil how the political-economic exploitation of Black and Indigenous people played an essential role in building American education as an inequitable system premised on white possession and white benefit. In doing so, he clarifies that present conflicts are not merely culture wars, but indeed structural in nature. American Grammar is a revised origin story that exposes this legacy of racial domination in schooling, demonstrating how the educational experiences of Black, white, and Native Americans were never all-together separate experiences, but indeed relational, all part of an emergent national educational landscape. Givens reveals how profits from slavery and the seizure of native lands underwrote classrooms for white students; how funds from the US War Department developed native boarding schools; and how classroom lessons socialized students into an American identity grounded in antiblackness and anti-Nativeness, whereby the substance of schooling mirrored the very structure of US education.

In unraveling this past, Givens provides more honest language for those working to imagine and build a truly more egalitarian future for all learners and communities, and especially those most vulnerable among us.

Review Quotes

"In American Grammar, Jarvis Givens has offered a new, meticulously detailed, and illuminating account of the origins of American education and the way schooling has served as contested territory for the making of the US citizen and the Republic. This is a superb and indispensable work of history." -- Imani Perry, National Book Award-winning author of South to America and Black in Blues

"Spectacular! Exceedingly well-written and brilliantly argued: at a time when schools have become yet another battlefield in the 'Culture War', Jarvis Givens, our pre-eminent scholar of Black Education, has provided us with a thoughtful history that sheds penetrating light on this troubling moment." -- Gerald Horne, author of African Americans & A New History of the USA

"Too many of us assume that public education is the story of increasing access to an undeniable American good. But not so fast! As American Grammar demonstrates with brilliance, erudition, and passion, American schooling proved crucial to advancing racial difference and the social domination that accompanied it. Situating figures such as "education president" James Garfield, educator Booker T. Washington, and his own Afro-Choctaw ancestor Susan McCoy, Jarvis Givens offers not only a fresh understanding of American education, but a rigorous exploration of the entanglements of Black and Native pasts. Deeply informed and beautifully written, this is a transformational work, one not to be missed." -- Philip Deloria, Author of Playing Indian

"In this new origin story of American schooling, Jarvis R. Givens foregrounds Indigenous and Black experiences, which are usually separated and marginalized in the broad narrative of U.S. education. Givens, instead, demonstrates the intertwined nature of Indigenous and Black educational policy and practice, and how integral they were to the creation and maintenance of U.S. educational systems. Combining deep historical research with trenchant analysis and first-person narrative, Givens unearths how the grammars of violence and race have structured our educational landscape." -- Christina Snyder, Author of Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson

"American Grammar opens powerful portals to African American and Indigenous histories replete with both tensions and possibilities. Through meticulous scholarship--including exploring his own genealogy--Givens has created a primer, a poem, and a call for honest dialogue about the consequences of erasure. This new grammar will provide us with the tools we need to cultivate a collective kinship." -- Maisha T. Winn, President, American Educational Research Association

"We learn as much about history from what is absent in its teaching as we do from what is present. In his magisterial new work, Jarvis Givens illuminates the ways in which indigenous and Black American paths through US history have shaped the dominant white educational system. The origin of public schools is intertwined with indigenous land dispossession and slavery, and the educational curriculum taught in these schools glorified a supposed white civilizational superiority, with the aim of delegitimizing indigenous and Black perspectives. While American Grammar is an essential work of American self-understanding, its morals about the strategic misuse of history are universal." -- Jason Stanley, author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future