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The American Civil War and the decade
following it ushered in one of the nation’s most dramatic changes in
formal education. Within weeks of the opening shots, two and a half centuries
of denying education to African Americans in the South came to an abrupt end
as freed slaves by the thousands sought out teachers and built schools wherever
Union forces took control, historians say.
By the end of Reconstruction, the freed slaves and their teachers had established
thousands of elementary schools and more than 100 secondary schools and colleges,
and laid the foundation for a Southern system of universal education.
But who taught the freed slaves and why? What did they teach and how did they
teach it? How did the freed people respond academically? How did white Southerners
respond to the education of the former slaves? These are just a few of the
questions College of Education historian Ron Butchart hopes to answer in a
new three-year study of the period, and he believes the answers he finds can
speak directly to the “achievement gap” between black and white
learners.
Butchart, a professor of social science education, has received a $318,775
grant from the Spencer Foundation to study the formal education of freed slaves
in the American South between 1861 and 1875.
“A Freed People’s Education: Learners, Classrooms, and Teachers
is a historical study of the teachers who worked among America’s former
slaves, the schools they created, the pedagogies they employed, and the students
they taught,” explains Butchart. “As a historian and educator I
am fascinated to know what motivated these teachers to do what they did.”
Previous research about freedmen’s education relied on virtually identical
primary sources, even when the researchers’ conclusions contradicted
one another, says Butchart. But this new project is multiplying the range of
sources consulted and links them in new ways, revealing patterns previously
invisible to historians.
“Prior studies have repeated the same basic characterization of the
teachers as young, white, relatively affluent, Calvinist women from New England,” he
says. “My research challenges every aspect of that image. There were
far more African-American teachers than previously believed, for instance.
These teachers talked about saving their own people because they realized if
they did not provide access to literacy, some people would try to re-enslave
them.”
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College
of Education historian Ron Butchart believes the answers he finds during his
study can speak directly to the “achievement gap” between black
and white learners.
