Happy 60th Birthday, Brown v. Board of Educaton! | Bill Ayers:
Happy 60th Birthday, Brown v. Board of Educaton!
All children need to develop a sense of the unique capacity of human beings to shape and create reality in concert with conscious purposes and plans. This means that our schools—both within and way beyond the existing institutional spaces called “school”—need to be transformed to provide children ongoing opportunities to exercise their resourcefulness, to solve the real problems of their communities, to imagine and invent. Like all human beings, children and young people need to be of use—they cannot productively be treated as “objects” to be taught “subjects.” Their cognitive and emotional juices will flow if and when their hearts, heads and hands are engaged in improving their daily lives and their surroundings.
Education is always an arena of struggle as well as hope—struggle because it stirs in us the need to look at the world anew, to question what we have created, and to wonder what is worthwhile for human beings to know and experience; hope because we gesture toward the future, toward the impending, and toward the coming of the new. Education is where we ask how we might engage, enlarge, and change our lives, and it is, then, where we confront our dreams and fight out notions of the good life, where we try to comprehend, apprehend, or possibly even change the world. Education is contested space, a natural site of conflict—sometimes restrained, other times in full eruption—over questions of justice.
Let’s take a look backward to understand a bit of falseness: on October 26, 1992 the US Congress designated Monroe Elementary School, one of the segregated Black schools in Topeka, Kansas, a
Happy 60th Birthday, Brown v. Board of Educaton! | Bill Ayers:
Last week we traveled to John Brown’s farm in the Adirondack mountains where we celebrated the Old Man’s birthday and his example to all of us of uncompromising and fierce resistance to slavery and white supremacy with the marvelous folks of JOHN BROWN LIVES! Greg Grandin, author of the dazzling The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World gave a stunning talk, expandi
by billayers / 0min
