Education System
The Education We Were Sold: Public Schools, Christian Colleges, and the America They Don’t Teach
I grew up in public school in the 80s and 90s. It wasn’t perfect, but it was real. We said the Pledge, we read To Kill a Mockingbird, and we learned that America was flawed but trying. Teachers could still talk about slavery without a school board meeting. We learned about the Civil Rights Movement because it had just happened. My Black classmates and I were in the same room, with the same books, trying to figure out the same country.
Public school then wasn’t trying to protect us from history. It was trying to prepare us for it.
That’s not the public school system now. Now it’s test scores, lockdown drills, and politics in the classroom before kids can spell “constitution.” They’ve gutted civics, cut art, and turned teachers into data managers. They’re so scared of offending someone that they teach no one. Kids graduate now and can’t tell you what the Three-Fifths Compromise was, but they can write an essay on their trauma. That’s not education. That’s erasure with a counseling referral.
Then there’s the rise of the Christian university. I experienced it myself. I went looking for truth and found a curriculum. They told me they taught “Biblical worldview,” but what that meant was: America is a Christian nation, founded by Christians, for Christians, and if you question that, your faith is weak.
Christian colleges and a lot of Black colleges both sell the same promise: We’ll teach you the truth they won’t teach you out there. But too often, they just teach you a different lie.
The Christian university didn’t teach me the correct education of America. It taught me a version of America where slavery was a “sad chapter” God used to bring people to Jesus. Where the genocide of Native people was “Manifest Destiny” and that was somehow holy. Where Martin Luther King Jr. gets quoted once in January, but never the part about white moderates or capitalism. We read the Founding Fathers like they were apostles and skipped the parts where they owned humans.
I wasn’t educated. I was indoctrinated into patriotism with a cross on it.
And Black colleges — HBCUs — I respect them. They saved lives. They built doctors and lawyers when nobody else would. But some of them, now, are so desperate for funding and respectability that they’ve sanded off the edges too. They teach Black excellence but skip Black rage. They teach how to succeed in America but not how America was built on our backs. They’ll give you Frederick Douglass, but not the part where he said, “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” Because that question is still dangerous.
The public school system of the 80s and 90s wasn’t great, but it was honest in a way nothing is now. We argued. We debated. A teacher could say “this country did terrible things” without losing her job. Now public school is neutered, Christian college is myth-making, and too many Black colleges are trying to prove they’re “safe” for white donors.
None of them teach the correct education of America because the education system is flawed to its core, especially now. It was built to create workers, not citizens. It was built to create unity, not truth. And now it’s built to create test scores, tithes, or alumni donations — not people who can look this country in the eye.
I went to public school in the 80s and 90s. I went to Christian university after. They are not the same. One was trying, badly, to tell the truth. The other was trying, expertly, to sell me a story.
That’s the flaw. The system doesn’t teach you how to live in America. It teaches you how to not upset America.
And I’m done being a good student of that lie.
