The Importance of Education in a Time Such as This

September means back-to-school. In my day, school shopping meant new clothes, notebooks, a backpack, pencils, and a few other essentials. For some Americans today, it means shopping around to find a school that suits one’s ideology regarding race, religion, American history, and diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Nelson Mandela once said, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” He was right. Many of us see education as a transformative, momentous game-changer that can level the playing field of life. For decades, education has been the foot in the door to upward mobility — a better job, a higher salary, and homeownership in a zip code with more educational options for our children.

In the early half of the 20th century, the sons and daughters of sharecroppers — children and grandchildren of enslaved people — studied in segregated schools and went on to attend HBCUs to gain a foothold and begin moving their families into the middle class and beyond.

Eventually, schools were desegregated, and Black American children could receive the same education as their white counterparts. With desegregation came a world of new opportunities for Black and Brown children. Professional positions were open to the general, melanated public for the first time in American history. But desegregated education didn’t come easily and was often accompanied by discrimination, protest, and physical violence.

Most of us still see education as a stepping stone — a tool we use to study and better understand a wide range of topics, especially our history. Yet today, we’re seeing books being banned from schools and items of historical significance being removed from museums.

Most recently, the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., has found itself in the crosshairs of far-right criticism. A 2025 executive order reframes U.S. history, removing anything that “suggests the U.S. is stolen land” and recharacterizing the nation’s past as one rooted purely in “colonization.” The order also targets museum programming depicting animated people with disabilities, an exhibit about the “Legend of Drexciya” — an underwater kingdom populated by the children of pregnant women who were thrown overboard or jumped into the ocean during the Middle Passage — and a stop-motion animation chronicling the career of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

This is why we can’t have nice things. We can’t have education or museums that show the truth of American history — that America wasn’t “discovered,” that the land wasn’t gifted to settlers, that chattel slavery didn’t involve “volunteers,” and that the atrocities committed generations ago still affect and afflict people deemed “other” in this country.

Let this be the September we educate ourselves and our communities on our true American history and heritage. After all, if the government wants to depict “solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing,” then what better representation of that progress exists than the hyphenated Americans who have succeeded despite the nation’s history of racism, discrimination, and privilege?

Visit libraries, museums, and monuments before changes are made. The rewriting of our past profoundly shapes the rewriting of our future. Education remains a stepping stone — but we must insist that it be a step up for our communities, not a step backward toward a disadvantaged past littered with broken hearts and unfulfilled dreams.

Let’s educate ourselves now. Because while books, classes, and museum exhibits can be taken from us, as B.B. King once said, “The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”