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Part I - The Political Role of Young People in Schools of Poverty

In 1772, at the Court of the King’s Bench in London, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield agreed with the American fugitive James Somerset that he was a free man and not the property of his master. The slave’s act of ­self-emancipation produced anxiety, argument, ­counter-argument, and increased movement toward rebellion across the Atlantic in the American colonies.12 Lord Mansfield declared property in human beings to be so “odious” a concept that it could not be countenanced by common law, and was nowhere established in the positive acts of Parliament. Slaveholders in the colonies consequently feared that their slaves would attempt to free themselves as well, and that they would seek and find protection in King George’s courts. By 1776, British encouragement of slave rebellions had proceeded far enough as both a political and military strategy that the Declaration of Independence includes reference to the King’s “excit[ing] domestic insurrection among us” as one of the colonists’ reasons for creating a new nation.13 Fear of runaway slaves was so important a motive for the revolution that the southern states insisted in 1787 on Article IV, Section 2 of the Constitution, requiring the return of fugitives to their masters. If the states with few slaves would not agree to treat fugitives as property, the states with more slaves were prepared to forego the advantages of political union.

The Constitution, of course, did not settle the issue; slaves ran away despite its provisions. From the Revolution to the Civil War, again and again, the acts of slaves seeking their freedom provoked conflicts between white people: suits for the return of runaways; trials of those who protected runaways; the abolition movement itself, fueled by the fact and narratives of fugitive slaves and by their active participation in the agitation and struggle against slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a final step before war, caused intense escalation of conflicts between competing factions of white people as they tried to position themselves in response to the self-liberating acts of slaves. In 1854, for example, the liberation of nineteen-year-old Anthony Burns, who had fled from captivity in Virginia to freedom in Massachusetts, resulted in a national political crisis. When federal authorities in Boston attempted to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act by returning Burns to his master, thousands of both white and black abolitionists took to the streets, surrounding the federal courthouse. The mayor of Boston imposed martial law, and the President of the United States, Franklin Pierce, authorized the dispatch of US Marines to assist in returning the fugitive to Virginia.

Each insurgent act of running away, or of poisoning or arson or violence against a slaveholder, had its own ­origins in the mind and body of the slave.14 Sometimes the unit of insurgency was a single person; sometimes a pair or small group; sometimes a band, or even scores or several hundreds in the case of the larger rebellions. Eventually, a complex network developed to support the insurgent runaways—the Underground Railroad—that might be thought of in certain cases as just several houses or farms or churches on a particular route north and, in other cases, as a whole system of communication and material assistance. All these manifestations and effects of the intention to be free hinged on each individual slave’s understanding of his or her own interests—not the interests of the slaveholder, not the interests of the northern sympathizer, but the slave’s interests. They acted, and white people with their hands on the levers of power were unable to ignore the altered circumstances caused by the insurgent slaves’ actions. Powerful people re-acted to the deliberate, consequential, voluntary movements of the less powerful, expending incalculable energy in debate, publication, assembly, argument, legislation, material assistance or material obstruction, culminating in four years of mutual maiming and slaughter, none of which would have followed from a slave population that was merely docile and inert.

The great majority of fugitive slaves were young, roughly seventy-five percent between the ages of thirteen and twenty-nine.15 Most histories do not clearly identify these young people as having played a central political role in the country’s sectional conflict or in the development of its constitutional principles. Many historians consider the maneuvers of statesmen who were enacting laws, making speeches, publishing arguments, and giving orders, or of the voters and economic interests to which these statesmen responded. Others discuss economic and legal structures, capital and labor markets, geography, technology, literature, journalism, and so on. But the political role of the fugitive slave should be understood as central.16 Each act of running away was a fully moral act, whether or not the fugitive considered or was even aware of the legal and political arguments of the powerful. And fully moral acts always carry political implications; that is, they necessarily raise questions of who has power and who does not.

The uncontrolled movements of young people in poverty today, and particularly of the descendants of slaves, generate debates about educational “reform” in much the same way that the uncontrolled movements of their insurgent ancestors generated debates about the status of slavery before the Civil War.

The indocility of young people in high schools, for example, provokes tensions and hardening of positions around school discipline and policing. The concept of “zero tolerance” feeds on the fear of insubordination, violence, and defiance; but the harshness of zero-tolerance policies provokes the outraged reactions of civil libertarians, of some parents, and of a certain kind of child advocate. This dynamic—sometimes articulated as between “permissiveness” and “structure” or between “freedom” and “order”—plays out again and again in schools as in the larger society. Here we are stressing the necessary contribution to this dynamic of the young people’s stubborn agency. Just as it was necessary that slaves stubbornly ran away in the antebellum south for there to be a controversy at all about the legal status of the runaway, so the education wars depend for their existence on the stubborn indocility of students in poverty and especially of descendants of slaves today. The Department of Education rewards states that fire teachers whose students have certain test results. The teachers and their allies demonstrate to retain their rights and privileges because young people in poverty stay home from school, cut class, ignore assignments, and defy authority. Without their defiance, the fuel for the education wars would burn out. Insurgent slaves would not tolerate political arrangements that left them enslaved, and eventually forced those arrangements to change. Similarly, young people today—whether recognized as political agents or not—defy educational arrangements that lock them into second-class citizenship; they are pushing and will continue to push on those educational arrangements until the whole country is forced to confront and change the caste system of education.

It might be objected that slaves were escaping from conditions that were detrimental to their well-being in every conceivable way, but the education that young people resist today is at least potentially helpful to them, and certainly the extent of physical and emotional oppression that they suffer is incomparable to slavery. Maybe so, although not everyone would agree that even “successful” state education has a benign effect. Our point, however, is not that the conditions young people oppose in schools are equivalent to the conditions slaves opposed. We are saying only that the fact of young people’s resistance to schooling and the fact of slaves running away and seeking to free themselves both have and had the parallel political effect of white people coming into conflict with each other in reaction to the slaves’ and their descendants’ actions.

Still, it is hard to ignore the obvious parallels between the plantation owners’ analysis of slave behavior and the typical theories and systems of control employed by most twenty-first century schools for young people in poverty. Both systems rely on coercion, because they interpret the slaves’ or students’ motives as either bestial or diseased. For example: “In working niggers, we always calculate that they will not labor at all except to avoid punishment, and they will never do more than just enough to save themselves from being punished, and no amount of punishment will prevent their working carelessly or indifferently.”17 The same theories in almost the same words can be heard in many staff lounges, and not only from white teachers. The punishments envisioned are various humiliations along the lines of course failure and “being written up” as first steps toward physical exclusion from the class or school. Not only informal attitudes, but the official policies of most schools for adolescents in poverty assume that without “consequences” (the twentieth-­century euphemism for “punishment”), students would do no academic work at all, probably would not even bother attending school or classes, and would, most likely, run amok. A whole panoply of physical movements are alternately prescribed and proscribed: where the students must or may not sit; where they must or may not go; which doors they are required and which doors they are forbidden to use; which books or materials they must or may not touch; which websites they may see or must not see; when they must stand and when they may not stand; when they may use the bathroom; when they may eat; when they may or must leave the building; when they may or must speak. All these modal constraints depend utterly on punishment and the threat of punishment. Well-run schools, like well-run plantations, are places where the “consequences” for violating requirements are swift and certain. And for most teachers, administrators, students, and parents, it is unthinkable that students would go where they are “supposed to,” “do their work,” or “stop talking” unless they feared punishment—humiliation, failure, or physical exclusion. Plantations developed elaborate pass systems to control the movements of slaves, and schools for children in poverty often require all students outside of class to carry a pass issued by a teacher or authority. Slaveholders developed systems of patrol to prevent unauthorized movements and to return slaves to the plantations. Schools for students in poverty hire police, security officers, and “hall monitors” to patrol inside schools, demanding to see passes, and police daily arrive at schools with vanloads of truant students who have been apprehended for existing where they do not belong. Places of detention and humiliation, stocks and stockades, were established to confine difficult, unruly slaves. Schools for poor children have “in-school suspension” centers where disobedient students must sit all day, often forbidden to speak. The official, written policy in the school where I teach commands that students on “in-school suspension” must sit facing the wall, each young person forbidden to look at any other. The policy does not yet require students to be placed in physical stocks.