Love, Leadership, and Learning: The Parent’s Role in Educating Black Children

By Dr. Rashid Faisal

Educating Black children starts at home. Urban education scholar Dr. Rashid Faisal shares the 3Ls of educating Black children: Love, Leadership, and Learning.

I began thinking about this essay while reflecting on the recent controversy surrounding journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter Najya’s education. A decade ago, Hannah-Jones wrote about her family’s decision to enroll their daughter in P.S. 307, a segregated, high-poverty public school in Brooklyn. She argued that families with resources, influence, and social capital should not simply remove their children from struggling schools while expecting other families to stay.

In a recent reflection, however, Hannah-Jones revisited that decision and the academic consequences her daughter believes she faced. Their candid discussion has sparked a national debate about school choice, educational inequality, parental responsibility, and whether a parent’s commitment to a larger social ideal should ever come at the expense of one’s own child’s education.

Rather than critique Hannah-Jones’s parenting decision, I think Black parents should ask a more productive question: What are we responsible for in our children’s education and socialization?

Answering that question may require what I call human adaptive change: the difficult process of examining deeply held beliefs, habits, priorities, and behaviors, and changing them when they no longer yield the outcomes we desire. Adaptive change is distinct from simply finding a technical solution. Changing schools, hiring a tutor, buying a computer, or enrolling a child in a program may help, but none necessarily changes how a family thinks about education. Adaptive change begins with us.

The philosopher George Santayana is widely credited with the observation, “A child educated only at school is an uneducated child.” That statement offers an important starting point. Schools are important, but they were never meant to shoulder the entire responsibility for our children’s education.

I propose three intersecting parenting practices (the 3Ls: Love, Leadership, and Learning) as a framework for rethinking how we socialize and educate Black children. The objective is broader than earning good grades. We should prepare our children to gain a competitive advantage in life while developing the knowledge, character, skills, and sense of responsibility needed to make value-added contributions to their families, communities, and the larger world.

Love

We begin with Love.

Loving our children means more than providing food, clothing, shelter, affection, and protection. Educational love means creating a home environment where literacy, curiosity, discipline, conversation, reading, creativity, and intellectual development are integral to family life.

Children should see books in our homes. They should hear adults discuss ideas. They should be taken to libraries, museums, cultural institutions, bookstores, historical sites, college campuses, performances, and community events. They should be encouraged to ask questions. They should know their history. They should encounter adults who expect them to read, think, create, and learn.

We sometimes call these experiences supplements to education. I would challenge that language. The education the family provides is not supplemental. It is foundational. The school builds on an educational process that has already begun in the home.

Leadership

The second L is Leadership.

Parents must lead the household’s educational culture. A statement widely attributed to W.E.B. Du Bois captures the principle beautifully: “Children learn more from what you are than what you teach.” Whether we consider those words in relation to education, character, work, or relationships, children are constantly observing us.

If we tell children reading is important, but they never see us read, what have we taught them? If we demand that they become lifelong learners while demonstrating little curiosity ourselves, what have we modeled?

Educational leadership does not require a college degree. A parent can model intellectual curiosity without a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree. Read. Ask questions. Learn something new. Visit the library. Watch a documentary and discuss it. Ask your child what she is studying, and then ask her to teach you something about it. Let your children see you change your mind after learning something new. That is lifelong learning.

Parents must therefore ask difficult questions of themselves:

What are my values regarding education? What am I responsible for in my child’s education? What constitutes good educational parenting? What value am I adding to my child’s intellectual development?

These questions shift parents from spectators to leaders in education.

Teachers matter. Schools matter. Coaches, mentors, peers, and community institutions matter. But none should replace parents as the primary architects of a child’s foundational socialization.

Learning

The third L is Learning.

Parents have a responsibility to place children in the best learning environments reasonably available. That will look different across families and communities. It may involve a traditional public school, charter school, magnet school, independent school, homeschool cooperative, or another setting. It may eventually include college, skilled trades, apprenticeships, entrepreneurship, military service, or other postsecondary pathways.

The important question is not simply, “What school does my child attend?” The better question is: “Is my child receiving a quality education?” Is my child becoming a stronger reader? Writer? Thinker? Researcher? Problem solver? Communicator? Creator? Is my child intellectually curious? Does the environment maintain high expectations? Does my child have access to adults who recognize and develop their potential? Parents should know enough about quality education to recognize when it is (and is not) occurring.

The education the family provides is not supplemental. It is foundational.

Eliminating the Noise

Finally, the 3Ls require us to confront what I call “noise.” Noise is anything that consistently pulls adults or children away from the sustained investment required for positive socialization and quality education. Some noise is technological: endless scrolling, gaming, social media, entertainment, and constant digital stimulation. Some is cultural: messages that make intellectual effort appear undesirable or education irrelevant. Some noise belongs to adults: overscheduling, misplaced priorities, consumerism, or letting other institutions and personalities influence our children more than we do.

The solution is not to remove children from popular culture or technology. It is to make sure those influences do not become more powerful teachers than the family. Because somebody is always educating our children. The question is who, and toward what end?

Successful Black parenting therefore requires more than reacting when report cards arrive or selecting what appears to be the “right” school. It requires building an educational culture within the family.

Love them enough to create the environment.

Lead them by becoming an example.

Value learning enough to seek the best educational opportunities available, and to create what is missing.

This begins within individual families, but it does not have to end there. Imagine these expectations spreading from household to household, then throughout neighborhoods, communities, cities, states, and eventually across the Black world.

School has an important role. But the family must never surrender its own. Our children should arrive at school already understanding something fundamental:

Education is not merely something that happens to them between the opening and closing bells. Learning is part of who they are, what their family values, and what they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Let’s love and lead our children by demonstrating through words, actions, and deeds how much we value learning.

Illustration may be AI-generated.

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