TEACH FREEDOM
Schools are an obvious venue for the creation of a public space, a site of freedom. People are coming together, searching for something better, deciding what we value, what we hope to pass on, who we want to be. But schools are seldom constructed as sites of freedom nor places for the practice of freedom.
An urgent challenge to teachers is to see each student as a three-dimensional creature — a person much like themselves — with hopes, dreams, aspirations, skills, and capacities; with a body and a mind and a heart and a spirit; with experience, history, a past, a pathway, a future. This knotty, complicated challenge requires patience, curiosity, wonder, awe, humility. It demands sustained focus, intelligent judgment, inquiry and investigation. It requires wide-awakeness since every judgment is contingent, every view partial, every conclusion tentative. The student is dynamic, alive, in-motion. Nothing is settled, once and for all. No view is all views and no perspective every perspective. The student grows and changes — yesterday’s need is forgotten, today’s claim is all-encompassing and brand new. This, then, is an intellectual task of serious and huge proportion.
As difficult as this challenge is, it is made tougher and more intense because teachers typically work in institutions of hierarchy and power, command and control, where the toxic habit of labeling kids by their deficits has become the common-sense and a common-place. The language of schools is too often a language of labeling, a language of reduction, a language lacking spark, dynamism, imagination, or the possibility of freedom. Whatever the labels point to—even when glimpsing a chunk of reality—are reductive and over-determined in schools. In this way they represent un-freedom—repression, coercion, entanglement. The thinking teacher needs to look beneath and beyond the labels, to reach toward freedom.
Another basic challenge to teachers is to stay wide-awake to the world, to the concentric circles of context in which we live and work. Teachers must know and care about some aspect of our shared life — our calling after all, is to shepherd and enable the callings of others. Teachers, then, invite students to become somehow more capable, more thoughtful and powerful in their choices, more engaged in a culture and a civilization. More free. How do we warrant that invitation? How do we understand this culture and civilization?
Teachers choose — they choose how to see the world, what to embrace and what to reject, whether to support or resist this or that directive. As teachers choose, the ethical emerges. James Baldwin says:
The paradox of education is precisely this–that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no TEACH FREEDOM | Bill Ayers:
As difficult as this challenge is, it is made tougher and more intense because teachers typically work in institutions of hierarchy and power, command and control, where the toxic habit of labeling kids by their deficits has become the common-sense and a common-place. The language of schools is too often a language of labeling, a language of reduction, a language lacking spark, dynamism, imagination, or the possibility of freedom. Whatever the labels point to—even when glimpsing a chunk of reality—are reductive and over-determined in schools. In this way they represent un-freedom—repression, coercion, entanglement. The thinking teacher needs to look beneath and beyond the labels, to reach toward freedom.
Another basic challenge to teachers is to stay wide-awake to the world, to the concentric circles of context in which we live and work. Teachers must know and care about some aspect of our shared life — our calling after all, is to shepherd and enable the callings of others. Teachers, then, invite students to become somehow more capable, more thoughtful and powerful in their choices, more engaged in a culture and a civilization. More free. How do we warrant that invitation? How do we understand this culture and civilization?
Teachers choose — they choose how to see the world, what to embrace and what to reject, whether to support or resist this or that directive. As teachers choose, the ethical emerges. James Baldwin says:
The paradox of education is precisely this–that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no TEACH FREEDOM | Bill Ayers:
