Thompson: Ta-Nehisi Coates & School Reform
Toni Morrison rightly compares Ta-Nehisi Coates to James Baldwin. I hope teachers and education policy makers will read CoatesBetween the World and Me, and consider its obvious implications for school improvement. I do not want to drag his beautiful book, a touching letter to his son, into our vicious school reform wars. Instead, I will review some of the key parts of Coates’s wisdom that can inform our practice and education policy, and mostly leave our education civil war to another day.
I would think that teachers would be thrilled to have a politically conscious student like Coates. Surely most of us would welcome the creative insubordination of a high school student who would quote Nas and challenge us with the idea “schools where I learned they should be burned, it is poison.” After all, teachers and education policy-makers should all wrestle with Coates’s indictment of schools for “drugging us with false morality.”
At times, however, class discussions involving Coates could easily become uncomfortable. He “was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests.” Moreover, “if the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up on your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.” If that doesn’t hit too close to home, Coates adds that he resented school more than the streets.
Schools are supposed to be a “means of escape from death and penal warehousing.” But, too often, educators don’t understand what it takes for poor children of color to avail themselves of that escape hatch. For instance, he recalls that “each day, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not.”
Coates knew he was being robbed of that third of his consciousness, and that education should enrich his entire mind. But, he felt that school “had no time for the childhoods of black boys and girls.” Coates found himself “unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to be unfit for them.”
One scene in Between the World and Me that has gained attention is its account of Coates’s insubordination with his 9th grade teacher and his father’s response. Reaching for his belt, his father said, “I can beat him, or the police.” (This scene becomes especially valuable when read in context with Jorja Leap’s Project Fatherhood.) Coates says of the punishment, “Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t.” He then explains how this dynamic pervades so much of the ghetto. “All I know is, the This Week In Education: Thompson: Ta-Nehisi Coates & School Reform:
