BOULDER, CO (December 16, 2025) — In this month's episode of NEPC Talks Education, Christopher Saldaña speaks with Jarvis Givens, professor of education and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, about his new book. American Grammar: Race, Education and The Building of a Nation centers the experiences of Black and Native Americans in the origin story of American education.
Givens challenges the familiar narrative of American public education as "the great equalizer." He argues that this conception rests on historical narratives focused solely on white experiences while ignoring how common schooling was structurally developed through the subjugation of Black and Indigenous peoples. He points, for instance, to the Land Ordinance of 1785, which facilitated the founding of public schools through the dispossession of Native lands. He also notes that early school funds were invested in banks that profited from the slave trade.
Givens explains his use of "grammar" in the book's title as a way of thinking structurally about how law and policy create conditions determining who fits, and who does not, within American education. He also draws a crucial distinction between "exclusion" and "domination," arguing that the traditional framing of racial injustice as exclusion is inadequate. Black and Native peoples were never truly excluded from the story of American education, he contends; rather, American schooling developed directly through their subjugation.
When asked what he hopes readers take away from the book, Givens says he wants to shatter the idea that education has ever been a benign institution. Education has always been political, he emphasizes, and the choices educators, students, and community members make inevitably carry political implications.
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