God Schooling: How God Intended Children to Learn

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It's problematic in our work as historians to view schooling as a white good with romantic nostalgia, unless we are recovering stories of resistance, empowerment, and justice. Footnote 48 In higher education, for example, some eleven million acres of Native homelands were commodified by the Morrill Act of 1862 to support state colleges and universities.Footnote 25 Charles Tilly developed a theory of “opportunity hoarding” to understand how white people leverage their networks to acquire exclusive access to seemingly open resources, work that was expanded in educational history by John Rury, and in educational sociology by John Diamond and Amanda Lewis. Footnote 11 Of course, whiteness was, and is, just such a “collective mind,” influenced by the collective utility of white goods to any white person. Instead I assume each individual has a set of ordinal preferences with respect to his consumption of all goods (collective as well as private). Footnote 87 Charles Mills offered a similarly withering critique of the field of philosophy; critical race theorists have exploded the field of law and legal studies. Footnote 36 Yet Asian Americans were still targets of racist and conceptual violence, and those who did not fit the racist stereotype in ethnicity and behavior have been raced differently.

Legal instruments such as restrictive covenants and redlined federal loan maps were part of the process too; but they came later in the game, adding new tools by which white people could dominate public goods through violently racializing space and converting that violence into legally legitimated property ownership. Turner, “Sponsored and Contest Mobility and the School System,” American Sociological Review 25, no.

Nevertheless, when the white interest was served by non-white schooling, for example, when enslaved and free Black laborers’ literacy and numeracy could be profitable, it was allowed, as Frederick Douglas experienced in the port city of Baltimore. Atheist teens make up a very small proportion of the NSYR sample: 3%, similar to the low rates of American adults who say they don’t believe in God. White Americans have used nearly every aspect of schooling to reproduce the existence of their group and its advantages—to give meaning and value to white-occupied spaces, support group identity formation, create and valorize white history, language, and literature, allocate cultural and social capital, create jobs, promote religion, develop individual and collective human capital, provide corporate welfare, childcare, social certification, and more.