No School Like Freedom School
Printer-friendly version“You are the hope of the future.” That’s the message Marian Wright Edelman, executive director of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF), gave more than 1,500 excited college students and recent graduates as they began a week-long training for the CDF’s Freedom Schools. She was preparing them for a daunting task—that of transforming the educational prospects for thousands of students across the country.
Later, one group of trainees, crowded inside the confines of a bright Hula-Hoop, tried to move in tandem toward a pink and orange ball. In this exercise, the ball represents a child who struggles in class and fears that she, like her mother before her, will not finish school.
The trainees traded ideas about how to move closer and reach the “child” despite the encircling Hula-Hoop. In the follow-up discussion, team members expressed frustration about the barriers they had faced. Though the trainees had been afraid of failure, the exercise had forced them to speak up and build on each other’s ideas. More than anything, they had