Why Are We Leaving So Many Children Behind?

By Renee Moore

I once saw a photo in an old Life magazine (circa 1955) of black elementary students in South Africa under apartheid. Having no supplies, they were using their fingernails and some old pins to cut out pictures for a learning activity. A few students were using their fingers to write their lessons in the dirt.

I thought about that photo on a recent visit to my mother's hometown, North Buxton, Ontario—one of the few remaining settlements established in Canada by former slaves who had reached the end of the Underground Railroad. In its prime, the settlement school offered courses from Latin and Greek to vocational training. After the Civil War, some of its graduates returned to the U.S. to help educate the newly freed slaves. The reputation of that settlement school was so impressive that it attracted blacks and whites from great distances.

Americans of African descent were the only group of people in the history of this country who were forbidden by law to read or write. It was punishable to be caught teaching black people (enslaved or free) to read or even to give them a Bible. Yet the more education was denied black people, the more they pursued it for...