The new presidential administration is enacting an education agenda the same way it is doing everything else: in a blitzkrieg, implementing sweeping measures as hastily as possible with little regard to their legality or feasibility. This rapid-fire assault — on trans youth who need gender-affirming care, on teachers who convey the basic facts of American history, on Head Start educators who need to make payroll—has a devastating material impact on countless individuals’ ability to teach, learn and feel safe in schools.
Beyond these tangible consequences, the hailstorm of actions has a broader effect. The vitriol leaves us on our back foot, always and only reactive at best and immobilized at worst. We find ourselves arguing. The education journalism outlet The Hechinger Report called it “a new culture of anxiety in education.”
Every headline, every urgent text and furtive conversation and terrifying social media post comes with an insidious whisper lurking in the back of your mind. Give up, it says. Give in. Let go. This is not incidental; sowing the seeds of chaos and accumulated despair is part of the president’s fascist agenda. We are afraid, and as a result, the imminent threat of violence forecloses our ability to imagine.
And yet, as soon as we cede the territory of the imagination, we’ve already lost.
Many of us have become familiar with Toni Morrison’s reminder that racism serves to distract us from our work. In the same 1975 speech, she had more to say, describing what happens when our capacity for imagination is “eroded day by day, day by day, by consistent assaults from racists.” Then, Morrison says, “the will just settles into a little tiny heap of sand, and you just have a second-rate existence, jammed with second-hand ideas.”
When news circulated that a school in my hometown of Chicago had turned away government agents at the door, I received urgent messages from well-intentioned friends outside the city. Among these smart, caring, dedicated people whom I love and trust dearly, there was a surfeit of panic — and discussion more or less ended there. No one asked if the kids were OK, or what it might look like to support those teachers, or those parents, or that block. No one asked, how can I help? I point this out not to tsk-tsk them, but to say that this government is, in all things, nudging us toward responses that limit our capacity for collective action, in precisely the moments when such action is most urgent. The trick is to exhaust us as efficiently as possible. Dread consumes us as we ruminate on the intentions of people and state actors that seem utterly out of our control.
But many things remain firmly within our grasp, and our insurgent dreams are chief among them. To remix Audre Lorde: dreaming is not a luxury. It’s an absolute necessity.
What’s more, we have examples of how to do it. Many of the most transformative educational environments in the history of this country have been led by caregivers and elders outside of formal schools, beyond the surveilling reach of state actors. In the 1950s, when racism kept millions of Black people from being able to vote or earn a fair wage for their work, community educators like South Carolina’s Bernice Robinson — a seamstress and cosmetologist — developed thriving classes to teach their peers how to calculate their labor hours and the pay they had earned, and to read their own letters. Nearby, businessman Esau Jenkins drove workers on buses between the Sea Islands and their day jobs in Charleston, and spent each bus ride teaching his passengers how to pass the exclusionary literacy tests that kept them from the polls. These were not just lessons in practical matters; they were lessons of dignity, collective power and community resilience, countervailing a social world engineered to disempower the many for the benefit of the few.
And in our generation, the Indigenous STEAM Collaborative co-designs programming with and for Indigenous youth, families and communities that center relationships with the natural world and each other. This work is outdoors, viewing lands, waters and more-than-human relatives as partners and teachers rather than objects. It is intergenerational, with infants and elders bringing their own wisdoms to the table — and challenging the horrific history of Native youth being extracted from their families, kidnapped and coerced into schools that were designed for their extinction. Challenging the colonial vision of science as a tool that helps humans dominate the earth and accumulate wealth, these learning spaces cultivate the continuity of Indigenous knowledge systems for new generations of Native youth, including an orientation of kinship relations with the planet and each other that may be our only hope against climate change.
Right now, teachers have every reason to be guarded about what they say and do within state-surveilled school spaces. But teachers’ selfhoods do not end at the door of the classroom. Teachers are friends, neighbors, beloveds — and they are amazing organizers. What would it look like for classroom educators to bring their many skills — developing curriculum, thinking of long-term plans and strategies, collaborating, serving as trusted mentors and leaders — to church basements, to street protests, to circles in living rooms? What would it look like for friends and neighbors to join them en masse? How can we, all of us, commit right now to a new kind of “public education” — not supplanting or replacing formal schools, but subverting an authoritarian grip on them?
I didn’t learn about the police murder of Fred Hampton, the world-changing legacy of the Great Migration, or the movement to end apartheid in South Africa for the first time in school. These are stories my mother taught me, because she knew she couldn’t count on them being taught in my classrooms. She was one of the innumerable caregivers tasked with creating a counter-curriculum, unable to rely on the certainty of school as a culturally affirming space that would teach us what she deemed to be critical history.
Lest all this “dream” talk sound soft and squishy and immaterial, it’s imperative to understand this nightmarish moment as actually being a reflection of someone else’s dream. Groups like Moms for Liberty and The Heritage Foundation have spent years bringing their most deeply held conjurations across the threshold into reality. Regardless of who prevails in the halls of power, who has more lawmakers and more funding on their side, in this one matter — the matter of imagination — we are equals. So how do we use our dreams as a map forward?
It’s not enough to be afraid of the laws and rules we don’t want to see in schools. We have to clarify our visions of what, how, where and with whom we want our beloveds to learn. What are we fighting for? Who are the young people you love most, and what do you dream for them? What are the values you hold dear that you want desperately for them to understand, to inherit? What are the histories, the legacies, the ancestors you need them to know? Where can you and the people you trust build collective power to make space for that teaching, for that learning?
Morrison called racism a “confidence game ” and “the red flag that the toreador dances before the head of a bull.” The people who spread visions of us as subhuman monsters, she teaches us, didn’t believe it themselves. But they only hoped that we would hear these narratives and “weep or kill or resign.”
We can weep, but we can’t resign in the face of the red flag.
To survive, we have to imagine the education we want for our babies, and fight like hell to make it real.
Eve L. Ewing is a writer, scholar and cultural organizer from Chicago. She is the author of Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism and a professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago.
