what did you learn in school today?

Central Arkansas Library System, Roberts Library

Underground Gallery

April 12 – June 29, 2024

What causes us to think what we think?

One major influence is what we learn in school.

This exhibition considers the effects of textbooks on students, like myself, who attended Little Rock Public Schools in the 1960s. Spurred by the Civil Rights movement, issues of race were a constant part of life for Little Rock’s African American community, and also for a middle-class white boy like me. While our schools were integrated, our textbooks taught us that life under slavery bordered on the idyllic, where slaves “knew their place.” But, after 1865, former slaves were now “idle, penniless, lawless; they stole, plundered, [and] burned houses.” I feature textbooks used in Little Rock public schools during the mid-Twentieth Century, and via photography, collage, and sculpture, consider ways that what we were taught in Little Rock schools has had a lasting effect on the city and its people.