Writings on hip hop education from hip-hop’s golden age onwards have often concerned themselves with the relationship between educational institutions, pedagogic practices and spaces and the vernacular identities and multicultural literacies of their disadvantaged students. This parallels and is related to the contentious educational debates that erupted during the so-called US culture wars of the 1990s concerning race, cultural identity, relevance and value. Accordingly, the chapter argues that a chief source of hip-hop education’s legitimacy derives from an abiding insistence amongst its practitioners and advocates that the more ostensibly “positive” and “conscious” examples of rap, in keeping with the black cultural continuum, express hip-hop’s inherent didacticism. I describe and examine these issues and their methodological and pedagogic claims – past and present – against a backdrop of moral panic that has long dogged rap music but also supplied it with critical impetus. The final section of the chapter offers a case-study of a recent British hip-hop education programme that seeks to make use of UK drill music to develop the capacities of educationally disaffected school-age young people.