When Education Becomes the Battlefield

Education today is contested ground, just as it has always been. To teach honestly about  race, history, and power is to confront realities that challenge the world as it is. Across the country, we see what happens when those realities surface: books pulled from shelves, teachers warned not to name racism, families given the right to “opt out” of lessons labeled controversial. These attacks are not random. They make clear that the classroom itself has become a battlefield, with knowledge being targeted because it threatens the official narrative.

Education, if it is to matter, must be practiced as freedom, not silence.

I will never forget a moment in my classroom that made this clear. After reading declassified COINTELPRO documents about the government’s efforts to dismantle Black freedom movements, one student looked around, lowered their voice, and asked, “If the government did this to them, what would they do to us?” The room went still. That question was more than shock at the past. It was recognition that dangerous knowledge is not only about what happened, but also about how authority still operates today.

History shows us that reforms often created the appearance of progress without changing the foundations of inequality. Brown v. Board declared segregation unconstitutional, but white families responded by fleeing to the suburbs or founding private academies—deliberate strategies to resist integration. These moves weren’t accidental; they were organized responses meant to preserve racial separation under a new guise. In many districts, public funding and zoning laws reinforced this divide, proving that desegregation orders alone could not undo a system determined to adapt. This adaptation of racism wasn’t only structural; it was also institutional. As Leslie Fenwick documents in Jim Crow’s Pink Slip, Brown also triggered the systematic dismissal of tens of thousands of Black teachers and principals. Communities that had relied on these educators for generations lost not only jobs but pillars of leadership, mentorship, and advocacy.

Desegregation may have opened doors for some students, but it also dismantled the very teaching corps most invested in their success. Reform came with costs that reshaped Black education for decades.

Affirmative action likewise opened opportunities but fueled a “colorblind” rhetoric that treated race as irrelevant even as inequities deepened. As many warned, reforms that only adjust the rules leave the foundations intact. Racism adapts. It goes underground. It reemerges in new forms. My students see this too. They ask why they are called minorities when they are the majority in their schools. They wonder why their neighborhoods never appear in textbooks. Their questions reveal what reforms alone cannot solve: education cannot simply grant access to broken systems. On this battlefield, reform without transformation leaves students standing in the same place. Education must help them imagine something altogether different.

The student’s question about COINTELPRO captures why some truths are treated as threats. Learning about government surveillance of civil rights leaders was not only about history. It raised questions about how dissent is policed today and why exposing injustice is always framed as dangerous. We see echoes everywhere. Activists tracked by new surveillance technologies. Teachers told not to mention systemic racism. School boards removing books that disturb the myth of American innocence. Even debates about whether Black history should be taught at all echo earlier fights to suppress abolitionist newspapers or silence civil rights leaders.

Knowledge is marked as dangerous precisely because it exposes continuity. It connects then to now, showing students that the fight for truth is not over—it is unfolding right before their eyes.

Critics argue that focusing on the past traps students in it. But memory is not a burden. It is a guide.

I have watched students wrestle with lessons about injustice and then turn to each other to ask what they would have done in similar situations. After reading about marches and boycotts, they say, “If we were alive back then, we would have walked out too.” Or, “We would have fought against those laws.” At other times, students researching their neighborhoods uncovered stories of local resistance—a tenant strike, a boycott, a march that never made it into the textbooks. Knowing that these actions happened just blocks from where they live reshaped how they saw themselves. The past was no longer distant. It was personal. That realization altered how they perceived their own power in the present.

Book bans, attacks on lessons about slavery, and restrictions on ethnic studies are all designed to sever young people from the very legacies that equip them to resist silence. Erasing memory is another strategy of the battlefield. To erase memory is to disarm resistance.

Taken together, these insights clarify what is at stake. Reforms are fragile. Categories of belonging are constructed and must be questioned. Memory, when honored, offers the direction needed for freedom.

What we face today is more than a fight over curriculum. It is a struggle over whose humanity is recognized and whose stories are allowed to live.

Education that settles for neutrality reinforces silence. Education that practices freedom does the opposite. It prepares students to name injustice. To remember what has been erased. To imagine futures beyond imposed limits. When my student asked, “If the government did this to them, what would they do to us?” they named the challenge before us. Knowledge unsettles authority. Dangerous truths will always be resisted by those invested in erasure. But danger is not a reason to turn away. It is the clearest sign that the work matters.

The real question is not whether it is dangerous to know, but whether we will continue to teach the truths that must be known.