Nikole Hannah-Jones Doesn’t Know What Education Is

For as much time and effort that Nikole Hannah-Jones has spent reporting on public schools and education policy, she evidently doesn’t know what education is, or its purpose.

In a sprawling and widely-read essay for The New York Times Magazine, the creator of the ahistorical 1619 Project chronicles her and her husband’s deliberate decision to enroll their daughter, Najya, in one of New York City’s worst public schools — and the entirely predictable, if shocking, results. (At one point, Hannah-Jones recounts her realization that her daughter thought she could do basic math but in fact could not, and that her writing assignments “were rife with uncorrected punctuation, capitalization and grammar errors.” Her teacher was simply not checking her work.)

The piece, like all of Hannah-Jones’ work, is an extended racist screed and a work of political propaganda. In this case, it lays the blame for New York’s failed public school system at the feet of white people who, unlike Hannah-Jones and her husband, choose not to send their kids to violent, failing schools that don’t assign homework and don’t actually teach students. Hannah-Jones and her husband, by contrast, chose just such a school for Najya, she tells us, because they “felt an obligation to make educational decisions based on the collective good and not just our individual advantage.” And the “collective good,” in her mind, meant not letting her daughter attend good schools because they have too many white kids.

Hannah-Jones’ essay goes into considerable detail about the frankly racist reasoning behind this decision, as well as the personal and relational toll it took on her family. But the piece also reveals something that Hannah-Jones likely did not intend. It reveals that she is not really very interested in education as such, but only as a credentialing mechanism. And in that sense, she has no idea what education is or what it is for.

It’s astonishing to read her account of the elementary and middle schools her daughter attended — violent and chaotic lunch hours with no adult supervision, no homework, no real classroom instruction — but even more astonishing to discover how seemingly uninterested Hannah-Jones was in the substance of Najya’s schooling. Years go by, it seems, without Hannah-Jones asking about what her daughter is reading, asking to look at her schoolwork, or pressing the school about not assigning homework.

And when she finally does press the school, and sees that the teachers are not grading her daughter’s schoolwork, which is riddled with errors, she doesn’t pull her out and seek a better school, but doggedly keeps her commitment to the “collective good” — even at the expense of her child’s education. Despite becoming a “thorn in the principal’s side,” Hannah-Jones and her husband failed to improve the schools they had chosen for their daughter. By the time she’s admitted to a decent high school, Hannah-Jones writes that Najya feels like she’s “drowning.”

“She had homework for the first time, and she was suddenly inundated with pages of nightly reading for her classes. She did not know how to manage the crush of assignments, and the effort that used to earn her A’s no longer cut it. Najya had never been taught the skills of independent study, and suddenly the child whose identity had been the nerdy honors student was working harder than she ever had and barely keeping up.”

Najya had never been taught the skills of independent study. It doesn’t seem to occur to Hannah-Jones that it was primarily her job, as a parent, to teach Najya the skills of independent study — especially if she knew that her daughter’s schools and teachers up to this point had not given her those skills.

Hannah-Jones writes about discovering, once Najya was in high school, that she actually was never taught Algebra, despite the fact that Najya had failed the statewide Algebra exam in eighth grade. “I enrolled Najya in algebra tutoring. After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”

Taken all together, the article paints a picture of an oddly disengaged parent who seems more concerned with proving a point about racial injustice than the particulars of her daughter’s education. Why was Hannah-Jones so uninterested?

Part of the reason is almost certainly because Hannah-Jones’ idea of education differs from both the classical western definition and even the more pragmatic, utilitarian concept of education adopted in the West after the industrial revolution. In classical terms, the purpose of education is to impart not just knowledge but virtue. An educated student is formed in truth, goodness, and beauty, which are the proper objects of an education. In utilitarian terms, the idea is to acquire basic skills that will enable the student to find remunerative employment.

Hannah-Jones seems to reject — or be completely unaware — of all this. For her, education is, on the one hand, a way of gaining credentials, and on the other, just another system to tear down as part of the cultural revolution. The actual content of her own daughter’s education is strangely neglected, despite all her agonizing over the racial and political aspects of the school system in New York. 

For parents who do understand the purpose of education, doing what Hannah-Jones and her husband did is unthinkable. That’s why so many families today are simply walking away from failing schools and school systems, either by starting or enrolling their kids in charter schools, private schools, or various versions of home-schooling.

It should be noted, too, that the advent of artificial intelligence will likely transform education so thoroughly that the older, classical understanding of education will become the only one that retains any coherence or relevance. If the point of school is not the formation of the student’s soul and the inculcation of virtue through exposure to and instruction in the good, the true, and the beautiful, then there isn’t much point to it.

Unless of course you’re in the business of selling racial grievances. In that case, what Hannah-Jones did makes all the sense in the world.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.