Can we talk about Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime performance for a bit?

Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show stirred America’s cultural pot over the last two days. Naysayers’ opinions have run the gamut from “I didn’t get it” to “It was too Black for me,” a sure sign that Lamar’s performance worked.

Nothing about Lamar’s musical tapestry suggests he would dilute his discography for people who refuse to get it. His resplendent use of America’s flag colors against his dark skin and his 400 co-performers’ skins including SZA and Serena Williams, was a body blow to President Trump’s enterprise. Co-President Musk and a plethora of unseen agents attempt to erase the legislative, intellectual, and economic gains of civil rights movements.

Therefore, Lamar’s artistry was the clarion call to cultural and interpersonal arms many of us needed.

Isn’t it wild that the same country that has both an illiteracy and an anti-intellectual problem has spent the last half-day dissecting Kendrick Lamar’s Halftime performance? Analyses have run rampant since Lamar’s 13 minutes were up (here’s one from David Dennis Jr. that works). It speaks volumes about the ways we construct educational experiences. When you read the meanings folks are making from the performance, you see the ways people are integrating knowledge from expertise and experience and forming holistic narratives about this electric display.

The disparate reactions make me skeptical that we “all want the same things” for an education.

They’ll say “But, Jose, we’re not Kendrick Lamar.” You’re right. But if you listen to a teacher who taught Lamar, you recognize that we have multiple Kendricks in our classrooms. According to this interview, Mr. Inge explains how he views all of his students as capable of success. In fact, in other videos, we see Mr. Inge’s pedagogy as firm, direct, and loving at once. These analyses seem based on skills learned from reading whole books and looking at math problems holistically, not simple passages.

It’s a good lesson for schools. Some have derided holistic pedagogies as soft or inefficient. Yet, some of our most brilliant works have come from the amalgamation of these content areas. For instance, treating science and social studies as applied English Language Arts and math gives us keys from which to make our lessons more engaging and exploratory.

Of course, post-NAEP score release analyses have focused on drilling students with skills, but that’s not new. “Drilling” advocates have pushed for efficiency and regimentation of skills as opposed to a slower, more social, and student-led set of inquiries into their work. I’m not asking us to abandon skill-based lessons altogether. Yet, some people want to teach kids to read small passages, but not expand their capacity for character- and world-building. Why are we limiting students’ literacy when we’re seeing evidence that whole books are central to students’ desire for literacy?

I’m asking for a reformation of what we consider education. I want the spectrum of what’s possible in our classrooms and schools. Akin to how Kendrick Lamar approaches his music.

It’s worth naming how our current contexts haven’t helped. American culture has moved from testing as one mechanism for assessment to testing as the education. While the Common Core State Standards have anecdotally raised academic expectations, its implementation left much to be desired. As the public school population becomes more racially diverse, the teaching population has become less so, which decreases the likelihood of a Mr. Inge and so many others in our schools. Administrators who committed to culturally responsive education a few years ago have dropped even the faintest hints of “equity” from their lexicon.

As overt fascism seeks to take a stronghold of our federal government, a better-educated populace would have used their literacy and numeracy skills to connect the historical, global, and contemporary dots. But people around the world have seen this and can’t believe America has allowed it anyways.

Kendrick Lamar sent floodlights out to the rest of the world that some of us been knowin’.

What would it take for us to move towards tapping more into curiosity and exploration? It starts with adults believing every student deserves experiences with curiosity. Schools with more students of color or students in poverty seem to never have permission to do “progressive” pedagogies. From there, we would do well to see how our lessons provide those student-led opportunities. It also means that we need to expand notions of “assessment.” The best teachers I know have a strong sense of students’ skills, but also their potential and how to elevate it.

But also, we should introduce more social learning i.e. the extent to which students learn together rather than individually.

The community learning element means students get to reach out to one another to solve problems and gain perspectives they otherwise wouldn’t. Imagine if that was a principle we embraced towards a more authentic democracy. Breaking out of silos means we should interrogate who put them there in the first place. Unifying a nation by stripping othered people of their rights, liberties, and communities’ expressions is no unity at all. We have multiple opportunities to exemplify this for our students in our institutions of learning i.e. our schools.

Kendrick Lamar sent America a message about what we know. A teacher gave him the skills to disseminate this to one of the world’s largest audiences. Up to now, many more classrooms are banning students from this pedagogy.

Will America listen?