Art Deco bas-reliefs, handmade quilts stitched by North Dallas freedwomen, ebony masks, and a bronze cowboy sculpture somewhere after the legacy of Frederic Remington all frame my visit to a workshop held by Kevin Marshall, MH ’27, in the African American Museum of Dallas. Somehow the dissimilarity, the anachronism, seems appropriate to Marshall’s workshop, titled “Ordering Rhymes: Understanding Hip Hop Lyricism Through the Liberal Arts.” Marshall, a Braniff Fellow studying classical education, is the founder of Freedom to Think, an educational enterprise situated in a tradition of liberal education including the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement alongside Aristotle and the ancient libraries of Timbuktu. 

For Marshall, the three elements of the trivium — grammar, rhetoric and logic — are not discrete subjects. They’re different degrees of observation, like settings of a microscope. A proper liberal education liberates the mind for free discernment; as Marshall points out, that begins with the ability to understand and make connections; that is, between words in grammar, sentences in rhetoric, and arguments in logic.

“If you’re able to diagram sentences, it helps you develop a sensitivity for the fact that everything is a relationship or in relation to other things,” he says. “That prepares one for logic, for rhetoric, and for just appreciating the nuance of language.”

Marshall has the typical academic bona fides under his belt. He’s taught at the college level, presented at national academic conferences and gained scholarship support for his work. But like many students of classical education in the Braniff Graduate School, Marshall remains passionate about introducing the liberal arts to students outside college age.

Marshall sets up his laptop in a library of the museum and plays some classic hip hop as attendees filter in. It’s a Saturday, but the discussion group soon includes middle schoolers, young parents, college students and middle-aged adults. This workshop examines the grammar, rhetoric and logic of hip hop lyrics, primarily focusing on KRS-One and Black Thought, but previous workshops have studied grammar and syllogistic logic in the speeches of Malcolm X. 

After giving a few examples of metonymy, antithesis and oxymoron, he’s waiting, with a patient teacher’s grin, for a simile. A group of attendees studies the sentence on the projector — a line from KRS-One’s “My Philosophy” — until the youngest one in the room comes up with an example:

“My money’s like the stars; I can never finish counting it.”

The writer, a 12-year-old who’s been to Marshall’s previous workshops, bashfully accepts applause from the rest of the group. Before long, everybody gets a chance to create figurative language or spot examples in the lyrics.

Athwart the slipping educational standards of primary schools around the country, Marshall insists that children and young adults embrace the challenge of grammar, along with the challenging conversations that can come with it. 

“One of my fondest memories growing up in elementary school is that one of my favorite teachers got us into sentence diagramming. As one of my mentors later on — years later, in my 30s — told me once, grammar is the foundation of all knowledge,” Marshall says. “Later on, you realize, ‘Oh, wow, it is.’ Because in fifth grade, sixth grade, when I was doing a lot of sentence diagrams, I was experiencing that, but I didn’t really appreciate it at the time.”

He and his wife incorporate the Socratic method in their own children’s education at home.

“Deep conversations can start early on,” Marshall said. “We read books and have a conservation about themes in the book.”

Marshall has also taught rhetoric to incoming freshmen of Huston-Tillotson University in Austin, Texas, and consulted for the Foundation for the Study of Science and Thought (BILDEV), based in Istanbul. Additionally, he’s working with Professor of Philosophy and Politics Joshua Parens, PhD, to develop projects for historically black colleges and universities with the Association for Core Texts and Courses, of which Parens is president.

The Freedom to Think workshops give young learners the chance to acquire and create rhetorical devices in a familiar setting. But for Marshall, hip-hop isn’t just a way to introduce rhetoric to young people. It’s a lyric genre worthy of rhetorical study in its own right, and it can provoke learners to consider logical connections as well.

Similarly, Marshall’s workshops on Malcolm X introduce attendees to sentence diagramming. Like hip hop, Malcolm X attracts a crowd, but he’s not a prop; Marshall says sentence diagrams expose Malcolm X’s logical purposes more clearly. Marshall presented an academic paper on the rhetoric of Malcolm X at a conference last year. 

“I try to start by contextualizing and inspiring, and Malcolm X is a powerful individual for that. He draws a lot of immediate attention,” Marshall says. “You deal with this inspiring figure and see that he used those liberal arts, and it helps you better appreciate him as a thinker, as a public intellectual, and not just as an activist in a one-dimensional sense.”

Meanwhile, in Dallas, the liberal arts are alive and well.

“People get to talking and working, and they’re there for the full four and a half hours,” Marshall says of the workshops. “Can you imagine? Busy parents, millennials, people that have other things to do on a Saturday. … It works with everybody. If you just put liberal learning out there, packaged in the right way, people get a really strong interest.”