Decolonizing SW Book Club - Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand (Virtual) - 1
5/20/2026
| Event Details |
Decolonizing Social Work Book Club -- Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand by Jeff Chu
Wednesday, May 20 | 12:00 - 1:00pm ET | 1.0 Implicit Bias CE
Virtual Zoom - Synchronous
Join us as we discuss Jeff Chu’s Good Soil. Jeff Chu had a seemingly successful life. As a writer at a fast-paced magazine company, he penned glossy profiles of business leaders while living with his husband in a New York City brownstone. Yet he struggled, as many of us do, with feelings of loneliness and disillusionment, all while trying to reconcile his identity as a first-generation Chinese-American. Seeking a remedy, he left his job and enrolled at Princeton Seminary’s “Farminary,” a 21-acre farm where students work the soil while asking the big questions of life.
Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: to
maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel. If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite
is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives. In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed
to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize” Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution
that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of
standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources. By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country
today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.
Good Soil is available through your favorite bookseller.
Jeff Chu. Writer, reporter, editor. Editor-at-large at Travel + Leisure. Teacher in residence at Crosspointe Church in North Carolina. Parish associate for storytelling and witness at the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley in California. PhD student in theology at the University of Stellenbisch. Minister of Word and sacrament in the Reformed Church in America. Cook. Gardener. Author.
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More about the Decolonizing Social Work Book Club:
Decolonization in social work is the undoing of hegemony, the latter being the process whereby white supremacist values impregnated foundational social work theories, research, and practices.
In recognizing that white supremacy is a mechanism of social control, that our current social structure is grounded in liberal-patriarchal capitalism, and that social work confirms to prevailing social norms, we, as social workers, must acknowledge
our complicity in perpetuating a white supremacist ideology (Crudup, Fike, & McLoone, 2021; Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014). One strategy for disrupting white supremacy in social work is to develop a counter-narrative (Crudup, et al., 2021;
Pewewardy & Almeida, 2014), a history that details the experiences of perspectives of those who have been oppressed, excluded, and silenced. The Decolonizing Social Work Book Club will meet on the 3rd Wednesday of each month starting in September
2024 and concluding in December 2025.
The voices highlighted in this book club offer counter-narrative perspectives across a range of issues and topics immediately relevant to social work. Location Virtual Zoom Meeting Presenters
Cost
CE Information
1 Implicit Bias Credit Hour NASW-MI Provider Number MICEC-0017. All NASW-Michigan CE courses also qualify for MCBAP credits. |
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