Black to School
Reclaiming Education for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our Community
Every August, the same images show up everywhere, crisp notebooks, first-day outfits, backpacks still stiff from the store. It's easy to watch that from the outside once you're grown, like it belongs to someone else's season now.
This month, we're talking about what it looks like to take our education back into our own hands for ourselves, for the people we're raising, and for the communities that shaped us. Not because school failed us (though for a lot of us, in a lot of ways, it did), but because our learning was never supposed to end when the diploma did.
“The most powerful weapon against a mind is a controlled education. The most empowering thing we can do is take it back.”
Why Independent Education Matters
A lot of us left school with degrees but with real gaps still sitting underneath them, the parts of our own history that got a single week in February and nothing else, the financial literacy that never made it onto a required syllabus, the health information a lot of us are still piecing together for ourselves well into our adulthood. That's not a personal failing, it's what happens when a curriculum gets built without you in mind, and it's exactly the kind of gap that's fully yours to close now that no one's handing you a reading list.
Pew Research Center's national survey on lifelong learning found that most adults who go looking for new knowledge aren't doing it for a grade or a promotion. Eighty percent said they wanted to learn something that would make their life more interesting and full, and sixty-four percent said they wanted to be able to help the people around them more effectively. That's basically the whole Chez Trendi philosophy showing up in survey data: we learn so we can show up better, for ourselves and for each other.
“ 73% of American adults consider themselves lifelong learners — most often reading, taking courses, or exploring topics simply because they're curious, not because a grade is on the line.”
Source: Pew Research Center
That curiosity is the whole point. You get to choose your own subjects now and for a lot of us, that choice is the first time education has ever actually felt like it belonged to us, instead of the other way around.
Bringing It Home
This isn't a new instinct, either. For most of American history, literacy itself was something Black families had to fight their way into, not something a school system simply handed over. Between 1740 and 1834, several Southern states made it a crime to teach an enslaved person to read or write. People found ways around it anyway: hiding spelling books, trading food for reading lessons, teaching each other in secret after dark.
That history is a big part of why reading and self-directed learning still carry different weight in a lot of Black households, it's less a hobby than a freedom that had to be won one word at a time, and that thread runs straight through to what's happening in a lot of our homes right now. More Black families are choosing to take their children's education into their own hands, building it around who their kids actually are instead of waiting for a public system to catch up.
“3.3% → 16.1% The share of Black households homeschooling jumped nearly fivefold between spring 2020 and fall of that same year — the largest increase of any racial group during that period.”
Source: U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey, via CNN
You don't have to homeschool to bring this energy home. It can look like Sunday history lessons, a shared reading list with your kids, or simply narrating the parts of your story your family never got taught in a textbook.
Building It Together
Independent education gets even more powerful when it's shared, and there's real precedent for what that can look like at scale. During the summer of 1964, in the middle of the Mississippi Freedom Summer voter registration campaign, volunteers set up dozens of Freedom Schools across the state, in church basements, on back porches, wherever there was room, teaching Black students the history and civics their underfunded public schools weren't offering them. Some of those districts were spending nearly six times more per year on each white student than on each Black student at the time. The Freedom Schools weren't a replacement for real, fully funded education. They were proof that community-built learning could hold its own against a system designed to withhold it.
41 schools, 20 communities, 2,135 students
That's what volunteers built in Mississippi in just six weeks during the summer of 1964 — out of churches, porches, and borrowed rooms, with almost no budget at all.
Source: Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Freedom School records
That same logic still works at a much smaller scale today. A book club is a classroom. A group chat where someone drops an article worth reading is a lecture hall. A hike where two sisters talk through what they're each working on is a study session nobody had to schedule. That's the spirit behind everything we build at Chez Trendi, spaces where showing up for your own growth and showing up for each other turn out to be the exact same act.
3 Ways to Start Your Own Curriculum This Month
Pick one gap, not ten. Choose a single topic you've always wanted to understand better; a period of history, a financial concept, a skill you never got formal instruction in. You're not trying to fix your entire education in a month; you're trying to start.
Set a standing appointment with yourself. Twenty minutes, once a week, same day if you can manage it. Put it on the calendar like it's a meeting you can't move, because the version of you who skips it is the same version who's been meaning to "get around to it" for years.
Bring someone in with you. Text a sister the book you're starting or the topic you're digging into. Studying alone is fine; studying in community is how it actually sticks, and it's a built-in excuse to check in with each other.
A Reading List to Get You Started
Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
A foundational read on education as an act of freedom, not just information transfer — perfect for anyone rethinking what learning is for.
→ Learn more via the bell hooks Institute
The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)
One of the most well-known accounts of self-directed education on record — including his own story of teaching himself to read and write while incarcerated.
→ Shop it at Nubian Books (Morrow, GA)
The Mis-Education of the Negro by Carter G. Woodson
The original text on why controlling the narrative of education matters — written by the founder of Black History Month himself.
→ Shop it at Medu Bookstore (Atlanta, GA)
This Book Is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell
A workbook-style read built for families who want to bring these conversations home to younger readers, one activity at a time.
→ Shop it at 44th & 3rd Bookseller (Atlanta, GA)
Sources:
Pew Research Center, "Lifelong Learning and Technology"
U.S. Census Bureau, Household Pulse Survey (via CNN, "More Black families are homeschooling their children")
Anti-literacy laws in the United States, 1740–1834 (South Carolina Negro Act of 1740; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life)
Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Freedom School records, Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964
