Can Education Change Society? by Apple Michael W

Author:Apple, Michael W.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136185830
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Remembering More Voices

In focusing on Du Bois and then on Woodson in this chapter, I have also made a number of points about the significance of the lives of black teachers and of women teacher activists in previous sections of this chapter. This is important not only because of the place they had in pressing from below and in occupying the spaces that people such as Woodson struggled to carve out for new identities for black educators in the larger battles against dominant relations. It is also important, however, to recognize that across multiple communities too often “black” is “represented as an ideological location that was gendered male (Henry 1998, p. 1; see also Rabaka 2007). Like so many other oppressed communities at the time, the debates over education usually focused on the education of men. As Renea Henry puts it:

We see within the strategic concerns of the debate between Du Bois and Washington, for example, an emphasis on the education of black men (the image of the boy in a cornfield reading the classics), their preparedness to participate in larger social and economic systems, their ability to serve as providers for traditionally configured households, and very little attention to the ramifications of educating black women.

(Henry 1998, pp. 1–2)

Yet here the restoration of collective memory, of the multiple voices that emerged from subaltern experiences, becomes even more significant. For there actually were notable discussions of this during the entire time when these debates flourished. Ten years before the publication of The Souls of Black Folks, the black educator Anna Julia Cooper published A Voice From the South (Cooper 1988). Central to Cooper’s concerns was the place of higher education for black women. For her, “The advancement of African-American women [is] a necessary condition of racial advancement and progress” (Henry 1998, p. 2).

To the reader now, a number of Cooper’s justifications for this may seem more than a little conservative. Her argument that the status of women represented a fundamental measure of “civilization” is not without problems, but its potency in advancing the cause of African American women is undeniable. Indeed, it is more than a little likely that Cooper’s book and its ideas had an influence on Du Bois himself, an influence that he did not acknowledge (Henry 1998, p. 2).

My point in raising the issue of gendered specificities is decidedly not to deny the utter importance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s life and work or to detract in any way from Woodson’s eloquent voice and dedication. Rather, it is to remind us (and me) once again of the unavoidable selectivity involved in highlighting voices from oppressed communities who challenged dominance and who envisioned an education that interrupted it. Our choices may partly reproduce marginalizations as well.9 Thus, for example, the fact that in Dare the School Build a New Social Order? Counts does not speak of the specific histories and realities of women and of women teachers and activists (see, e.g., Apple 1986), does not necessarily vitiate his

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