We Want to Do More Than Survive
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Winner of the 2020 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award Drawing on personal stories, research, and historical events, an esteemed educator offers a vision of educational justice inspired by the rebellious spirit and methods of abolitionists. Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex. To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom—not merely reform—teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.
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This is a critique of the current American educational system and a call to do better, especially for children of color. It condemns a mindset that parents, teachers, and children should be satisfied if a child merely survives primary and secondary education, and demands that children should get what they need to thrive from teachers and school. The book describes some of the ways that could happen–by teachers (as well as other community members) contributing to creating a “home place” for their students, for example, teaching students in whatever ways possible that they matter. There are chapters that explain the concept of educational survival and what it looks like, the ways racism shows up in education right now, the necessary ingredients of abolitionist teaching, along with examples of abolitionist teachers from the past, and the usefulness of critical race theory for creating a language to speak about the kinds of racism that has been mostly unacknowledged by whites in charge.
Bettina Love, the author, mixes this critique and primer on racism in education with examples of her own experience as a Black girl growing up in Rochester, NY, and her experiences as a teacher and a teacher educator. These anecdotes flesh out what she is writing about in a way that is helpful to someone who hasn't had her experiences, and in this way it is a very personal book. But she is careful to point out that it isn't enough to read a book or attend an anti-racism training for professional development. She says teachers need to get to know and love their individual students personally, in order to be invested in them, to want them to “win.”
This book contains lots of references to events in the news, authors, and educational and critical race theories, all cited with endnotes. It's an inspiring book. There were some places where I thought Beacon Press could have done a better job editing, but I recommend this to anyone who works in education.
