Art & Creativity Quote by Carter G. Woodson

Woodson isn’t describing a stray prejudice; he’s mapping an institution’s assembly line. “Drilled” is the tell: a word from military training and industrial discipline, implying repetition so constant it becomes reflex. The target isn’t simply belief, but the nervous system of self-perception. By placing the lesson of “inferiority” inside “almost every class” and “almost every book,” he indicts curriculum as a technology of power, not a neutral pipeline of facts.

The subtext cuts two ways. First, it reframes racism from personal animus to pedagogical design: a social order maintained by what children are made to read, recite, and absorb as normal. Second, it anticipates the psychological cost. Woodson is pointing to the manufacturing of consent, where the oppressed are trained to internalize the story told about them and, crucially, to doubt their capacity to revise it.

Context sharpens the charge. Writing in the era of Jim Crow schooling and mainstream textbooks that either erased Black achievement or reduced Black life to caricature, Woodson saw education functioning as a gatekeeper for citizenship. His broader project in The Mis-Education of the Negro was not simply corrective history; it was an argument that historical narrative determines political possibility. If a people are taught they have contributed little, they will be steered toward accepting little.

The rhetoric works because it refuses melodrama. “Almost” adds credibility, suggesting observation rather than slogan. The sentence reads like a field report from inside the classroom, where ideology arrives disguised as common sense.