Tracing the history of public education in America alongside the expansion and contraction of political rights, Derek W. Black’s Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy is a novel and necessary defense of public schooling. Exhaustive but accessible, the book concretely develops an argument often encountered only in the abstract: that political democracy and public education live and die together, and the choice is ours to make.

Black is a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law. He spoke with Jacobin’s Meagan Day about the historical evolution of American public education and the formidable new obstacles — in the form of drastic education cuts and school privatization — to fulfillment of the promise of knowledge and rights for all.