American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation

by Jarvis R. Givens

A new history of US education through the nineteenth century that rigorously accounts for Black, Native, and white experiences; a story that exposes the idea of American education as “the great equalizer” to not only be a lie, but also a myth that reproduces past harms.

Education is the epicenter of every community in the United States. Indeed, few institutions are as pivotal in shaping our lives and values than public schools. Yet the nature of schooling has become highly politicized, placing its true colors on full display—a battleground where clashes over free speech and book bans abound, and where the suppression of knowledge about race, gender, and sexuality have taken center stage. Political forces are waging a war on academic freedom, raising serious questions. What gets taught, how, by whom, and who gets to decide? Yet, how might our perception of this reality shift when we recognize such battles as expressions of a relationship between race, power, and schooling as old as the country itself?

Access and equity in public education have long been discussed and attempts to address the educational debts owed to historically oppressed groups have taken the form of modern innovations and promises of future improvement. Yet the past plays an equally significant role in structuring our present reality—and in the case of our education system, there is a dark, unexamined history that continues to influence how schools forge our world.

Harvard University professor Jarvis R. Givens, an expert in the fields of American Educational History and African American Studies, draws on his own personal experiences and academic expertise to unveil how the political-economic exploitation of Black and Indigenous people played an essential role in building American education as an inequitable system premised on white possession and white benefit. In doing so, he clarifies that present conflicts are not merely culture wars, but indeed structural in nature. American Grammar is a revised origin story that exposes this legacy of racial domination in schooling, demonstrating how the educational experiences of Black, white, and Native Americans were never all-together separate experiences, but indeed relational, all part of an emergent national educational landscape. Givens reveals how profits from slavery and the seizure of native lands underwrote classrooms for white students; how funds from the US War Department developed native boarding schools; and how classroom lessons socialized students into an American identity grounded in antiblackness and anti-Nativeness, whereby the substance of schooling mirrored the very structure of US education.  

In unraveling this past, Givens provides more honest language for those working to imagine and build a truly more egalitarian future for all learners and communities, and especially those most vulnerable among us.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Education, Politics, American History, Race

464 pages, Hardcover

Published October 14, 2025

About the author

Jarvis R. Givens is Assistant Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

NPR recommended this book as part of a list for US 250. While the thesis is interesting (history of the US education system to establish racial stratification between white, Native American, and Black people), I found the writing repetitive and overly-oriented toward other PhD researchers.

[Sarah]

I am enjoying this and am learning a lot, but I’ve got too many other books going right now. Will come back to it next year.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thoroughly researched.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

To those who bemoan that "everything has to be about race", the truth is that yes, every aspect of society in America is steeped in racism. We have to acknowledge the necessity of reckoning with our nation's relationship with African Americans and Indigenous people in order to properly understand the achievement gaps and inequities in our present day. This text is thoroughly researched, exposing the deep rooted racism embedded in our educational system. This book also brought to mind the very relevant and timely idea that the law is a social construct. That legal or illegal action is dependent on the times and on our retrospective views of history. If an act is legal, does that make it right? Is breaking an unjust law a righteous act?

I recommend this book for those interested in understanding the history of American education.

[Roxanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very educational book. it is about getting equal education for everyone. It talks about having people not be in slavery anymore and native American going to schools and learning. And it wants to first people who went to these schools to go out and become teachers themselves. In those times it was met with resistence for everyone to get an education. President Garfield did not like that races could be left out of education. He considered education to help rebuild the country post war.

[Joyce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enlightening discussion of the role of education in the history of the United States. The use of education to meet goals other than education provides an interesting backdrop to the state of modern education. As a resident of a school district taken over by the state, I wonder about some of the links.

[Victoria · Rating 4 out of 5]

NEVER STOP EDUCATING YOURSELF. walking away from this book with so much more knowledge than i came in with. it felt like a documentary on paper if that makes sense