Who Gets To Decide What School Means For Students?

What's your most vivid school memory? Do you remember it as a time of exploration? Was it a place where you could figure out who you were and what you wanted to become?

Or did it feel like it wasn't made for you? Did it feel constricting, or like a place with lots of rules about how you had to act and what you couldn't do?

Your experience of schools likely depended on the administrators, who your teachers were, how your city or state set up the curriculum, and the resources your school received. Writer Eve L. Ewing argues that experience could also be shaped by who you are.

What has school meant for students, and who influenced how schools function the way they do? And what are alternatives for how school could work for students?

We sit down with Ewing to talk about her new book, "Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism."

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