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TEACH FREEDOM: EDUCATION FOR LIBERATION IN THE AFRICAN AMERICAN TRADITION edited by Charles Payne and Carol Sills Strickland. New York: Teachers College Press, 2008. 304 pp. $29. 95.
In Teach Freedom: Education for Liberation in the African-American Tradition, editors Payne and Strickland weave reprinted articles and chapters with original work analyzing and acting on the legacy of emancipatory pedagogy in the African American tradition. Organized in a frame of "Sankofa: Looking Back to Look Forward" (113), this volume brings African American educational history alive and identifies implications for roads yet traveled.
Payne and Strickland present Teach Freedom in four parts that feature different eras in post-Civil War African American history and highlight "the self conscious use of education as an instrument of liberation among African Americans" (1). This idea is carried throughout the book - from its beginning in Reconstruction South to its end in twenty-first-century Washington, DC. Part I looks at the content and function of schools for newly freed African Americans during Reconstruction. The two chapters in this section introduce two of the book's recurring themes: the need to understand the capacity and dignity of learners and...