…Mattering, surviving, resisting, thriving, healing, imagining, freedom, love, and joy [are] all elements of abolitionist work and teaching.
Love 2019:2
In the opening pages of her book, “We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom” (2019), Bettina Love upends the traditional notions of classroom success rooted in the educational survival complex. In her description of a successful classroom, she does not mention mastery of arithmetic, fluency in Standard American English, or scoring highly on standardized tests. Instead, resistance, love, and freedom are all part of Love’s vision for a classroom in which true growth and learning can occur. However, the opening chapters of the book illustrate just how far the American school system is from offering a holistic educational experience. Under current conditions, most students, and especially students of color, are not set up to thrive. Rather, they must fight just to survive. Students and practitioners alike are stuck in what Love calls the “educational survival complex.” She identifies recent school reforms such as “No Child Left Behind,” zero-tolerance policies, no excuses policies, and standardized testing as tactics that force students (and teachers) to prioritize survival in the school system rather than pursuing true learning, education, or joy. Throughout the book, Love gives examples of how our current education system penalizes children, stunts their authentic exploration, and forces them into a mindset of survival.
Illustrating the educational survival complex in action, Love describes an incident in which fourth graders at a KIPP charter school, primarily students of color, failed to implement the test-taking strategies that the school emphasizes. In response, the school leader sent the following email to teachers:
We can NOT let up on them…. Any scholar who is not using the plan of attack will go to effort academy, have their parent called, and will miss electives. This is serious business, and there has to be misery felt for kids who are not doing what is expected of them.
Love 2019:31
In her assessment of the situation, Love notes that “dark children at KIPP cannot fail, cannot express their stress, cannot feel pain from a world that rejects them, and cannot make mistakes, one of the critical and necessary experiences of childhood” (2019:31). The demands that students not feel pain, not fail and try again, and not make mistakes, denies these young students their whole personhood. It demands that children leave their identities at the door, disassociate their experiences from their scholarship, and bring only what is palatable, in a world where “success” is defined largely by white adults, into educational spaces. In short, it is a form of oppression. It communicates to students that they don’t matter. Their ability to follow directions matters. Their test scores matter. Their subordination to standards set by the powers-at-be matters. But they, as whole humans, do not matter. Love refers to the effects of this messaging of not-mattering as “spirit murdering.” She asserts that “the racist, hateful language and systemic, institutionalized, antidark, state-sanctioned violence that dark children endure on a daily basis in the educational survival complex murders the spirit; it’s a slow death, but a death nonetheless” (2019:34).
Spirit murdering is in full swing in American school systems today. Just this year, Florida passed HB7, the Stop WOKE Act, formally titled the “Individual Freedom Act,” which instituted book bans in schools across the state, including materials that center POC, LGBTQIA+ stories, and any works engaging with critical race theory. It also prohibits educators from teaching about systemic racism. The word “freedom” in the bill’s title is beyond ironic. It is, in fact, an act of violence against all those whose stories are being actively erased from classrooms across the state. It communicates that the only freedom that matters, the only people who have access to full freedom, are cis-, heterosexual, able-bodied white folks: it is White Supremacy in action. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has also banned AP African American studies statewide on the basis that it “lacks educational value,” criminalizing the teaching of Black feminist thought, Black queer theory, and Black (dis)ability studies. To add insult to injury, the College Board, the organization behind both AP tests and the SATs did not immediately address the issue, but rather put out a hollow apology weeks later for not responding in a timely manner. The messaging is clear: the struggles, thoughts, and experiences of students of color do not matter. And by extension, students of color do not matter.
As educators committed to antiracist praxis, we must ask ourselves what we can do to counteract the spirit murdering happening in American schools. This systemic issue, which is tied to issues of poverty, the school-to prison-pipeline, and housing segregation, amongst other injustices, cannot be resolved by antiracist pedagogy alone. However, as educators, we can play a part in creating opportunities for and experiences of joyful learning, cultivating classrooms that reassert to students that they matter. They matter in their fullness because of who they are, not in spite of it.
In her book “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom” (1994), bell hooks talks about the importance of self-actualization and embodiment in the classroom. She writes that by suggesting we can bring ourselves piecemeal to the classroom, that there is a split between theory and practice, we are “perpetuating conditions that reinforce our collective exploitation and repression” (1994: 69). hooks notes that we must invite our full selves, and our students’ full selves–in all our embodied humanity–into the classroom. We must make space to remind students that their experiences and their stories are valuable. Along these lines, activities like Eugenia Zuroski’s “Where do you know from?” encourage students to reflect on their relationships to knowledge production, noting that antiracist pedagogy requires that we “recognise the myriad ways that thinking is inspired and sustained as equally ‘intellectual’ in status” (Zuroski 2020). Through such activities, we remind students–and ourselves–that our life experiences are valid sources of knowledge. We recognize that we are theory. We are knowledge producers. We combat spirit murdering by honoring that our spirits are necessary in the classroom. We cannot truly learn, or pursue what hooks calls liberatory education without them. In talking about embodiment, about wholeness, in the classroom, hooks describes her class as a dance. She includes the following testimony from a former student:
I love to dance. When I was a child, I danced everywhere. Why walk there when you can shuffle-ball-change all the way. When I danced my soul ran free. I was poetry. On my Saturday grocery excursions with my mother, I would flap, flap, flap, ball change the shopping cart through the aisles. Mama would turn to me and say, ‘Boy, stop that dancing. White people think that’s all we can do anyway.’ I would stop but when she wasn’t looking I would do a quick high bell kick or toe. I didn’t care what white people thought, I just loved to dance-dance-dance. I still dance and I still don’t care what people think white or black. When I dance my soul is free. It is sad to read about men who stop dancing, who stop being foolish, who stop letting their souls fly free…. I guess for me, surviving whole means never to stop dancing.
hooks 1994: 197
As antiracist practitioners, we cannot dismantle systemic spirit murdering with just one course. But we can acknowledge it, and we can offer an alternative. We can encourage our students to bring their whole selves, and their communities, into the classroom. We can welcome them whole, inviting their minds, bodies, and spirits, to dance with us.
Talya Wolf is a Sociology Doctoral Candidate at The CUNY Graduate Center. Her intellectual interests include care work, childcare, and intergenerational inequality. In addition to her doctoral stuides, Talya works as a nanny, teacher at Hunter College, and advising fellow for CUNY’s MALS program.
Citations:
hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge Press.
Love, Bettina. 2019. “We Want to Do More than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom.” Beacon Press.
Zuroski, Eugenia. 2020. “Where do you k now from?: An exercise in placing ourselves together in the classroom.” Retrieved May 2023 from https://maifeminism.com/where-do-you-know-from-an-exercise-in-placing-ourselves-together-in-the-classroom/.
