Season One, Episode Six

What Do Young People Want from Schools?
Student- and Community-Led Curriculum and Social Justice

Transcript coming soon!

This episode explores how often lesson plans devised for American children reflect adult biases about nation, race, and religion, and ponders the results of curriculum that winds up excluding the very children it is designed to educate. Where did our current educational standards come from? What power do students have to shape what their schools teach them? Who decides what is written in the textbooks children read? We have some surprising answers. 

---

image gallery

• 

• 

• 

• 

reading list

Archuleta, Margaret, Brenda J. Child, and K. Tsianina Lomawima. Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000. Heard Museum, 2000.

Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940. University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

Crain, Patricia. The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter. Stanford University Press, 2000.

Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of the Chilocco Indian School. University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

Macaulay, T. B. Minute on Indian Education. 2 February 1835.

Margolis, Eric Margolis. “Looking at discipline, looking at labour: photographic representations of Indian boarding schools.” Visual Studies, vol. 19, issue 1, 2004, pp. 72-96, DOI: 10.1080/1472586042000204861.

Rickford, Russell. We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Special issue on The Brownies’ Book. Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 14, no. 3, Fall 2021.

“Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories.” The New York Times, January 12, 2020.