Chapter 2: We Must End Educational Colonialism

Examining their thinking on the ideas of Chapter 2, Chris and Zac reflect on its original focus on the no-excuses school movement compared to the larger colonialist mindset growing in some larger conversations about the purpose and future of public education and teaching "other people's children."

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:51 Chapter 2: We must end educational colonialism
• 4:14 Zac & Chris reflect on how the need to battle against educational colonialist forces has shifted and grown in the last decade

Transcript

Zac: 0:00

Hi, I'm Zac Chase, and welcome to the Rebuilding School 2.0 podcast. Ten years ago, my friend, colleague, and co-author Chris Lehman and I released our book, Building School 2.0, How to Create the Schools We Need. It's a collection of 95 theses, a la Martin Luther, detailing our best thinking on what we can do to make schools better, more humane places for the people inside them. In each episode, we revisit one of the chapters from the book, and Chris and I sit down to examine how our thinking has shifted or stayed the same in the 10 years since the book came out. In this episode, we'll be investigating chapter two. Enjoy. Chapter two, we must end educational colonialism. Science Leadership Academy, SLA, was started by a group of educators with the idea that it would be the kind of school we would want our own children, real or theoretical, to attend. Our belief in an inquiry-driven, project-based, technology-rich approach to learning was not just for other people's children, but for our own as well. It is important to say this because there are a lot of powerful people right now who are advocating for a pedagogy in our publicly funded schools that they don't find good enough for their own children. Some of these powerful people are even running networks of schools that have a pedagogical approach that is directly counter to the educational approach of the institutions they pay for their own children to attend. Moreover, these same powerful people tend to get upset when asked about the disconnect. saying that the question is off limits. We don't think it is. We should ask why people of power advocate for one thing for their own children and something else for other people's children, especially when those other children come from a lower rung on the socioeconomic scale, or when those children come from traditionally disenfranchised segments of our society. It is, in fact, a very dangerous thing not to question. Because we've done this before in America and around the world, whether it was the United States government forcing Native Americans into boarding schools which decimated families and societies in the name of assimilation, or any of the many global examples of destruction as explorers claimed New World. History is rife with examples of disenfranchisement through systematic cultural colonialization. each ending tragically. For us, when you ensure that your own child has an arts-enriched, small classroom-sized, deeply humanistic education, and you advocate that those families who have fewer economic resources than you have should have to sit straight in their chairs and do what they are told while doubling and tripling up on rote memorization and test prep, you are guilty of educational colonialism. And it's time we start calling that what it is. The ideas in this book represent our best thoughts on education for all children, not just some children. If we are to truly engage in modern pedagogical education reform, it must be a movement of the cities and the suburbs of public and private and charter schools and for children of all colors and classes. To do anything else is to ignore the elephant in the room. that we are rapidly moving further and further into a bifurcated system in this country, where the education rich children get is vastly different from the education poor children get. We, all of us, must be committed to ensure that the income of a child's parents or the color of a child's skin does not prevent the child from engaging in a profoundly humanistic society. deeply empowering modern education. And if we allow those in power to advocate for a brand of education for other people's children that they would never allow for their own children, we will only perpetuate the worst abuses of our history. Christopher Jeremiah Lehman

Chris: 4:18

Not my middle name.

Zac: 4:20

We'll get there. We've got like 93 more chapters to get through.

Chris: 4:25

What's fun is I know that you're now going to have a different middle name.

Zac: 4:29

The challenge that I've laid down for myself is actually quite substantial. We must end colonialism, educational colonialism. Well, colonialism in general, but let's start in schools.

Chris: 4:40

That's right.

Zac: 4:41

We teased at the end of the last episode that this one, we started nice and fluffy of we should have this grand vision and kind of a city on a hill. And then this chapter, right afterwards, we decided to go all in on get your hands off, everybody.

Chris: 4:59

Yeah. This chapter is stop doing bad things to kids who don't look like you.

Zac: 5:05

Yeah, and so let's handle this one, this question right off the bat in the, has our thinking changed? The answer is no. We still don't want you

Chris: 5:15

to do that. Yeah, that's, if anything, we actually feel this even more. I am really struck by how much this chapter still resonated. There are so many chapters where I'm like, oh, we scratched the surface of a thing, right? Like, and there's 30 pages more to be written. And obviously people like Lisa Delpit, wrote whole books on this topic. But I also think just as a sort of manifesto of we need to end educational colonialism, this chapter stand, don't do this thing. And so I actually still really like what we said here a lot.

Zac: 5:56

When we were writing this book, I was in grad school the first time, and we were touring what was, I think, meant in a really positive way, a no-excuses charter school. And as we were touring it, we were there at the beginning of the day, and kids were coming in, and they were in their khakis and polos, and the kids had to pull up their pants to show that they weren't wearing socks with any brand insignia on it. These are elementary kids. And so somebody's job as an adult was to check and make sure there were no brand logos anywhere. And if there were, they went to the office and they called the parents and the parents had to come down. And this was the thing. And that set the tone for the entirety of how I saw kids being treated in this school.

Chris: 6:56

Right.

Zac: 6:56

And then at the end, the principal said, well, thanks for being with us. We'd love to hear what you thought of the school. And in my head, all I could think was, you really, you really don't want to

Chris: 7:08

hear what I have to say.

Zac: 7:09

There's nothing. Yeah,

Chris: 7:11

that's right. Yeah. I mean, I've had similar experiences, right? Where like, you know, we were asked to tour some of the no excuses charter schools. And I remember going to one and, And having the CEO say to me, well, we don't really believe different things. Chris, like, you know, what SLA wants and what we want are what's best for kids. But, you know, the kids we serve need this more. And I just, number one, thinking like the kids that, you know, like that is a profound misrepresentation of who SLA serves. But number two, like, no, they don't. Don't write like I think so much about, you know, and here it's like I want to cite our friends, Pam Moran and Ira Sokol, who talk about how kids need slack and abundance. Right. Like and so much of the sort of austerity movement of the no excuses educational movement. And I won't just say charter schools, because I think a lot of public schools went there, too. Didn't understand that. And I understand the need to have a baseline of acceptable behavior. I get that. I also don't get teaching kids to be soulless, right? Or without lacking themselves.

Zac: 8:36

It is implied. I cannot connect to your humanity until you have... performed some sort of act or fit into a set of expectations, right? That's right. Like if you were not wearing, literally wearing the uniform the right way, then my care cannot be extended to you. And me kicking you out of this community is like, I justify it by saying, well, this is for your own good, which is never like punishing somebody in the, and this is for your own good situation. tends to not be historically a really helpful thing that has been done to human beings.

Chris: 9:16

Well, and I actually would argue that it's a little bit worse than that, right? Which is that we'll sacrifice you for the greater good. I mean, you know that in Philadelphia, there was a network of schools that when a kid had transgressed too much and they were removed from the school, they lined up all the kids in the hallway and to watch the kid be marched out of the school and to show like, we're serious about this. We mean business. And number one, that's just scarring to the kid who's walked out. I mean,

Zac: 9:54

on the other hand, a fantastic episode of Game of Thrones for those who watch.

Chris: 10:00

Right? Or Hunger Games, right? Or any of that. But I think that tells every other kid in that building, you only have value while you tow the line, which also isn't good. There are standards of behavior, right? Like don't sell drugs in school, right? Like that has gotten kids removed from SLA. You know, like I still think back to some of the times when we've had to remove a kid from SLA for something really, really, really egregious. And when that happened, those conversations were still about like, I still care about you.

Zac: 10:37

Yeah, I will I will say a thing that I have said in front of lots of other people, but maybe not you necessarily. One of the things that working at SLA that you specifically taught me was the. willingness to have the conversation with the kid as long as the kid would engage in the conversation. Um, and just the number of times that you, you know, we, you'd walk into the common area of the office and both of your doors were closed and you would be in there for, I mean, God knows how long. And I, and sometimes I was in the office, right? Sometimes it was one of my advisees. Right. you're seeing that moment of transgression as a kid saying, I need help learning. Right. I think it is a piece that we have, we have like, right. That doesn't happen when you're checking socks at the door.

Chris: 11:33

That's

Zac: 11:33

right. Right. The kid that, that says to a kid, not only do your socks matter, but like step out of line, anything that's more severe than logos on socks and imagine what we'll do to you.

Chris: 11:43

There's a piece of me that understands the, um, seductive lure of educational colonialism i suppose right like you know like and you know really the funny thing that you realize as a school administrator is how few tools you actually have in the toolbox you know you've got restorative practices you've got you know you've got disciplinary measures you've got all these different things but they're pretty thin for like you know, at the end of the day, you got a handful of tricks, but not much else.

Zac: 12:17

Right.

Chris: 12:18

But the thing you

Zac: 12:19

have is talk. So that is an interesting piece to me because we wrote this book in a pre-pandemic world. And then the pandemic happened and people watched their kids go to school, quote unquote, go to school. Right. And then everybody had an opinion about schools in a way that they did not necessarily have before. And they felt like they needed to share it. And I need to preface this by saying, Big fan of democracy. Love its work. I think it's got a possible future. Well, we'll see, actually. In two and a half years, we'll find out. What happened when families got more involved because of what they were seeing, and maybe they understood it, maybe they didn't understand it, and we were all at the end of our rope because we were all locked in houses together. I think that's an important piece to remember, too. But on the other side of it, We became much freer with expressing and criticizing what was happening in our schools and not necessarily remembering that the education we were seeing on those screens was not their level best. It was the best they could do in that moment. And then we kept talking. And I think there's a misinterpretation of democracy meaning your voice matters full stop to that sentence.

Chris: 13:33

That's right.

Zac: 13:34

And that the real thing is your voice matters in conversation with the other voices. And you have to be willing to acknowledge that your idea is going to change. It might not win. And having the idea and requiring it to be acknowledged or requiring it to be the thing that we do is not democracy. That's right. Having the idea and participating and trying to make your level best argument. That's a little closer.

Chris: 14:06

This is where like Martin Buber and I am thou becomes really, really powerful, right? Because democracy isn't my idea matters. Democracy is actually your idea matter. When we understand that democracy is listening, then you get away from that a little bit, right? Like then that notion of like my idea has to win, right? is not as important, but rather this idea of synthesis, that your idea and my idea should interact and that the interaction is where democracy happens and the interaction is where meaning happens. And it's not I'm going to convince you to think everything I think or I think that my child's school should be doing exactly what I want it to be doing, but rather my child's school is going to listen to me and take my needs and wants seriously. But it's not going to take my needs and wants more seriously than anyone else's. I said to a parent last year, your child is one of 500. I want you to ask whether or not you think you are taking up more than one 500th of my time and whether or not I could sustain this if every parent wanted to discuss the details of their child's education as much as you do. They did not like that. But I said, that's what I have to consider because you, and what it really was, was this was a parent who was used to getting their way. And I was like, well, this is privilege. Who's not getting into my office or whose email am I not answering or who doesn't even think to make the phone call or make the email? And I can't reach out to them because I'm busy spending time, more than my 1,500th of time that I have on you. And not even your kid, but you. Like it's speaking to this notion of the people who were starting these no excuses schools were as school founders and school leaders coming from a place of privilege. And what we are seeing now is parents coming from their place of privilege. And what we don't understand is the sort of, to your point earlier, this democratic notion that schools have to be about all the voices.

Zac: 16:28

If you were going to say that schools should be democratic spaces and that they should be, knowing that those conversations, like the one that you described, are going to be part of being in democracy. Yours was a conversation with that parent, not about winning democracy, but about building toward understanding. You still valued that student. You valued that parent. And it wasn't about you winning or them winning, but it was about coming to an understanding about how the system worked. And I think what I mean by this chapter has changed in the 10 years since we wrote it, because we were writing really specifically at the kind of no excuses movement.

Chris: 17:13

That's right.

Zac: 17:14

And I would say now there's that colonialist kind of tendency, but then there are kind of individual household colonialist tendencies that say, you know, I want everybody's education to be. what I want for my students' education.

Chris: 17:34

So like there's a problem there, right? Because I do think like, for example, I mean, and I think on some level you could say, well, then why'd you write the book? If you think your ideas, if everybody's ideas should matter equally, then why did you write the book of a bunch of different ideas? Because I do think that an inquiry-driven, project-based, caring education would be a better education for everyone's child. Like I do believe that with all of my heart. But what I don't believe, just because I like a certain writer doesn't mean that everybody's got to read that writer. Or just because I think a political thing, that doesn't mean that everybody has to believe my political thing. We were talking about a pedagogical colonialism.

Zac: 18:18

Right. And I think the parental standpoint that I'm bringing in is the I, we don't believe that this thing is right, or we don't, we do believe that this person is right. And it's in, and parents and families can oftentimes feel like schools are saying, you're making, you're making space. Well, actually what is happening is that schools are creating spaces for kids to question what they believe to make sure that they know that like, if you believe it, that's great. Um, I think that that can oftentimes get interpreted as you are telling my kid not to believe the thing that we believe in our household. That's right. I would never do that.

Chris: 19:02

No.

Zac: 19:04

I've definitely taught children who live and families who believe things that are antithetical to my own personal beliefs. Yes. And that is okay because of the country in which we live. In fact, that's actually more than okay. Wait a

Chris: 19:20

minute, hold on. We built the country to allow for that. Yeah, that's right. And we built a public school system that allowed for that. And maybe this is the point of the educational colonialism. The educational colonialism was not about helping kids to become fully realized citizens, right? You didn't become a fully realized citizen in a no excuses school. You became a really good worker, right? you follow directions well, right? And that's what we were railing against. We wanted kids to question authority and to question their world and to engage in genuine inquiry. And the huge challenge of the pedagogy that we are advocating for is that if you teach kids to question their world, they're gonna turn that lens on you. And then you have to be worthy, you have to be able to withstand the questioning And I think a lot of schools, not just the no excuses charter schools, but schools all over, don't want kids to turn that inquiry lens on them. And if you are unwilling to do that, if you are unwilling to have the kids say, why is this the way that it is, and not be willing to engage in that conversation, then you are guilty of educational colonialism. And that's been true forever. There's a reason that 100 years ago or more, And still to this day, rich people send their kids to schools that prepare them to be leaders by questioning their world and that they expect the public schools to teach kids to be subservient so that way rulers can rule. And what we say at SLA and what others in our movement say is that every kid has a right to question their world. Because that's what being a fully real, that's how you create schools that genuinely serve a democratic society.

Zac: 21:21

It's also important because both sides of this conversation are questioning. And I think that like saying- Say more. You and I have taught many students who question their world. You have to do that and then do the work to find some answers. That's right. That's right. Just saying like, well, why do we have to do that is not- what we're talking about here. Like, why is this important? Which we'll talk about in another episode. That's a good starter question, but it shouldn't be the last, right? And I think that's the important piece. It's like, well, now you got to do some work because having the question doesn't mean outsourcing the thinking to somebody else to find your answer.

Chris: 22:03

And this is about getting kids to ask better questions and then to your point, come up with answers that are theirs. And if that means they end up Aligning with something that you think and believe, cool, great. If that ends up means that they align with something very different than what you think, even better. As long as they've gone through that process of thinking about it and being critical and being able to make the argument, right? Like being able to fully engage. And what is so sad about what we're seeing right now, it's that we're back to preaching is what people want. And that never a... negative thought about a country whose history and whose present is far too complex to contain only one answer. That's the closest I've come to a West Wing quote so far. That's good, that was good. Thanks, no, no, I can't let that moment go by. But the complexity, I think that that is a real danger of sort of educational colonialism that at the end of the day isn't all that different sort of from a valence standpoint, from what we were talking about in the chapter, which is that there's a lack of complexity to what the federal government wants our schools to be. And they want that because they want there to be one right answer, which is their right answer. And that's dangerous, and not just dangerous for those of us who don't believe what they believe, but if history tells us anything, It's dangerous for those people who want the kids to believe what they believe because they won't. And questions can come out helpfully, right? In a thoughtful crafted space where we teach kids to critically think and analyze and work within a system and sort of be institutionally willing to change things. But if the institutions are unwilling to change, then the other avenues people have when they begin to question are more dangerous and more violent and less civil.

Zac: 24:11

And at the school level, especially in a high school, they include disengagement. They include dropping out. They include leaving their education.

Chris: 24:21

That's

Zac: 24:21

right. In the book, you reference this. There's a From Theory to Practice section at the end of each chapter, some questions to help readers think through their own practice. And I would like to challenge us both to come up with a new from theory to practice. So I would say that for this chapter, my question for folks is how comfortable are you with your students disagreeing with you?

Chris: 24:48

Right.

Zac: 24:50

And where does that take you? Right. Like legitimately, like think of the student who, who is like, diametrically opposed to your way of thinking, how comfortable are you letting that student hold those thoughts? And then I will add a second question. Okay.

Chris: 25:07

You

Zac: 25:07

still are on the hook for another one.

Chris: 25:09

Okay.

Zac: 25:11

If you believe that student is wrong, what do you do? A student comes in and says something like, you know, being gay is wrong. That one's going to hit me a little close to the home, but what am I going to do? How do you approach that? Because as you just said, telling the kid, oh no, that's not true, doesn't tend to change hearts and minds as it works out. But Todd Rose, I think Collective Illusion is a book that has been stuck in my brain since reading it a couple of months ago. It's

Chris: 25:46

funny because it's stuck on my Kindle right now. It's so

Zac: 25:48

good. But the piece that he says early on in the book, when you are faced with somebody with whom you disagree, Or who you feel like maybe hasn't examined their own beliefs. The thing you just say is not how wrong they are, but, oh, why?

Chris: 26:04

Right. Well, but I think what's interesting is what you just said, though, which is that your goal is to figure out how not to just disagree, but rather to still how to change minds. You don't want that kid walking out of your classroom thinking, oh, yeah, Mr. Chase is cool with me thinking that being gay is wrong. You want to find a way to get them to examine their belief and come to a different one. But I think so. And on that level, like those folks on the right would say, look, they are indoctrinating our children. They're just doing it in a sneaky fashion.

Zac: 26:39

Right. And I would say that I don't necessarily want them to change their mind. I think it's maybe more important for them to understand the pain that that belief has inflicted. can and does and has historically caused other people.

Chris: 26:53

If you're going to

Zac: 26:54

believe that, I need you to know the impact that that belief is going to have on other people in your life. That's right.

Chris: 27:00

I mean, on some level, that it impacts the way I see you. Yeah. Right? And that our beliefs have consequences. Yeah. And I think that's okay. And there is no such thing as the valueless education, right? That is a myth. And it's funny because it's like, and again, my gosh, we could go on for hours with this, but like my mom always, you know, my mom was a teacher, as you know, and her whole thing was that like the kids never knew who she voted for. The kids never knew what she really believed because that generation of teacher believed that that's what you did. Right. And we don't do that. I'm like Lehman's world, no option to buy, but like, here's what I think. And I'm going to ask you questions about what you think, because I'm fascinated by it. Um, but yeah, like if I'm just going to sit there and say, you have to believe what I believe we're going to, we're kids are going to tune us out.

Zac: 27:53

And the thing that I, the things that I believed. Yeah. Well, that's is that I have done the work showing up to help students think this way to think about their world. to examine the world, to go all Socrates on things.

Chris: 28:08

Well

Zac: 28:09

done.

Chris: 28:10

So we've got West Wing, Bill and Ted's, and Martin Buber.

Zac: 28:13

And Todd Rose. I've had to do that work. That's the other piece. If you're not willing to do the work of thinking and examining your own beliefs and your own ways of thinking about the world, you may not be ready for prime time. You may not be ready for kids.

Chris: 28:31

Right. And I think that this is, whether we talk about... Hammond and culturally responsive teaching or any of those things right like for the longest time teachers didn't right and that was a very sort of what got taught was a culturally white teaching. And that probably still happens in many, many places. So, I mean, I think that this question of educational colonialism, as much as we stuck our, you know, to your point, we were writing about a very specific thing, and we used a very short chapter to sort of put our stake in the ground, that what we want for our own children, we should want for all children, and that if this notion of an inquiry-driven, holistic, critical thinking system slack and abundance kind of education should be what we want for all children. The flip side of that is also like educational colonialism means questioning our own ideas too, and making sure that we're not just colonizing the next group to believe what we, the next generation to believe what we believe. And that a civil society, a non-colonial society is one that requires critical thinking, diversity of thought, and the ability to exist with those who think differently than we do. And maybe that's why in this moment we're living, even though we were writing about something very, very different, this idea of educational colonialism still feels so relevant today. And so necessary to sort of speak out against because it manifests in many more ways than just the ways we were talking about it in the 300 words we discussed

Zac: 30:13

it. All right. What's your theory to practice question?

Chris: 30:14

My theory to practice is have conversations with kids who disagree with you, not to convince them of what you believe, but to allow your own ideas to be changed as well. Seek those things out. Seek out kids who think different things than you. When that kid is arguing that your policy in your classroom or your school is wrong, don't seek to convince them you're right. We have to listen to kids. Have a discussion. Whatever you think about AI... Listen to kids about what they think about it and be willing to have your mind changed. Be willing to think differently because of what people, you know, and again, in this case, specifically kids whose life experience is different than yours. Listen to what they bring to the table and listen for the moments where their voices are more expert than yours or just different than yours and their experience are different and be willing to be changed. That's how we defeat educational colonialism. is by being willing to be changed ourselves.

Zac: 31:27

Speaking about being changed, I think folks, yes, this is my segue. I'm doing a really good job. 2026.educon.org. EduCon is a conference that is held at SLA. It is Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. You can go to 2026.educon.org or just educon.org. This year in 2026, it will be January 30th through February 1st at Science Leadership Academy. It is an experience built around conversation. So one of the pieces, if you are considering submitting a proposal, One of my favorite questions in those proposals is how will this be a conversation and not a presentation. So if you think that the ideas in our book, or if you think the ideas in education are worth examining, then I highly recommend folks head to EduCon.org. Proposals are open until September 15th? Correct. Question mark? Exclamation point. Exclamation point. It's a fantastic time. One of my favorite things that I have gotten to help build in my lifetime. So Christopher Tiberius Lehman.

Chris: 32:36

And now we've

Zac: 32:38

referenced

Chris: 32:40

Star Trek. Well

Zac: 32:41

done. I shouldn't waste a middle name. I've got so many more to go. Always a pleasure, my friend. I'll talk to you next week.

Chris: 32:48

Awesome. So good to talk to you, my friend.

Zac: 32:57

And we'll talk to you next time. Bye.