At the beginning of 2019, the gifted
political journalist Susan Glasser wrote a column
titled “Is Optimism Dead in the Trump Era?” in which she mused on the “January
Effect,” the “year-opening optimism” of the stock market and, more generally “the
eternal hope for a fresh start” that typically characterizes many spheres of
our personal and political lives. But, she continued, given the current
occupant of the White House and the resulting ugly chaos, “Washington these
days is hardly a town for optimists, even of the January variety.”
Glasser’s column got me to
reflecting on optimism and hope, not just in January, and particularly in these
dark times. There is a passage in the writing of Czech playwright and
statesman, Vaclav Havel that is relevant here:
Hope… is not the same as joy that things
are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously
headed for early success, but, rather an ability to work for something because
it is good.
Even
when things seem at their bleakest, Havel continues, true hope impels us forward,
“gives us the strength to live and to try new things.” Social movements are driven
by this kind of hope.
Another way to think about hope is
to ask what in our lives acts as a counterforce to the dulling and blunting effects
of evil, helps us see the good, hold to it, and work toward it? As I was
reading Glasser, reading her and interiorly talking with her, I realized that
for me a longstanding source of hope, of what might be, is the classroom, or,
more exactly, all that the classroom represents at its best: a sanctioned space
for growth, learning, discovery, thinking and thinking together. The classroom
is the site of teaching, which in my late adolescence changed my life and
subsequently has given my life great meaning —teaching, so beautifully described by education scholar Eve Ewing as “moments
of intense focus and commitment where trying to help someone understand seems like
the most important thing in the world.”
My last post
on counting and writing might be relevant here. In that post I encourage
counting and describing the small particulars of daily life: “…everyday tallies
and scribbles that can lift you momentarily out of the flow of events, help you
take notice and give you a tool to think about what you perceive.” This
attention to commonplace detail can have moral consequence. Detail grounds us
in a time and place, is a hedge against stereotypes and easy labelling. Life is
vibrant before us, in the case of the classroom, the vibrancy of learning and
growing, which for me becomes a source of hope and commitment.
I’m trying to think my way into
something here, and apologize for the gaps in reasoning. Let me offer some less hazy examples from past
writing of what I’m reaching for. The first comes from the introduction to Possible
Lives, an account of my visits to good public school classrooms across the
United States.
I.
I had been studying schools for much of my adult life,
had been trying to understand how they enhanced the lives of students or
diminished them. Most of that work was located in and around the LA Basin. For
all its bewildering complication, Los Angeles was familiar territory, home.
These trips to Calexico, to Baltimore, to Eastern Kentucky, to a nation within
a nation in northern Arizona brought forth new cultural practices, new languages,
new gestures. I was fortunate to have been escorted into so many classrooms, so
many homes, to have been guided into the everyday events of the communities I
visited, for the invitation eased the unfamiliarity and discomfort that could
have been present on all sides. What I experienced was a kind of awe at our
variety, yet an intimate regard, a handshake on the corner, a sense of shared
humanity. The complex interplay of difference and commonality. What began as a
search for a fresh language of educational critique and invention became, as
well, a search for what is best in this country — realized infrequently,
threatened at every turn — but there to be summoned, possible in the public
domain, there to instruct a traveler settling into a seat in the corner of a
classroom.
It was, in
many ways, an odd time to be on such a journey. The country was in the grip of
a nasty reactive politics, a volatile mix of anger and anxiety. And people of
all political persuasions were withdrawing from engagement with the public
sphere. It was the time of economic and moral cocooning. The question for me —
framed in terms of public schools, our pre-eminent public institution — was how
to generate a hopeful vision in a time of bitterness and lost faith, and,
further, how to do that in a way that holds simultaneously to what educational
philosopher David Purpel calls “the interlocking and interdependent hinges” of
criticism and creativity. How to sharpen awareness of injustice and
incompetence, how to maintain the skeptic’s acuity, yet nurture the ability to
imagine the possible and act from hope.
The journey
was odd for me in another way, considering my own teaching history. My work in
the classroom has mostly been with people whom our schools, public and private,
have failed: working-class and immigrant students, students from nonmainstream
linguistic and cultural backgrounds, students of all backgrounds who didn't fit
a curriculum or timetable or definition of achievement and were thereby
categorized in some way as different or deficient. There are, as we have seen
along this journey, long-standing social and cultural reasons for this failure
of our schools, tangled, disturbing histories of discrimination, skewed
perception, and protection of privilege.
And yet
there were these rooms. Vital, varied, they were providing a powerful education
for the children in them, many of whom were members of the very groups defined
as inferior in times past and, not infrequently, in our ungenerous present.
What I began to see — and it took the accumulation of diverse classrooms to
help me see it — was that these classrooms, in addition to whatever else we may
understand about them, represented a dynamic, at times compromised and
contested, strain in American educational history: a faith in the capacity of a
people, a drive toward equality and opportunity, a belief in the intimate link
between mass education and a free society. These rooms were embodiments of the
democratic ideal. To be sure, this democratic impulse has been undercut and
violated virtually since its first articulation. Thomas Jefferson’s proposal to
the Virginia legislature for three years of free public schooling, for example,
excluded the commonwealth’s significant number of enslaved Black children. But
it has been advanced, realized in daily classroom life by a long history of
educators working both within the mainstream and outside it, challenging it
through workingmen’s organizations, women’s groups, Black schools,
appropriating the ideal, often against political and economic resistance, to
their own emancipatory ends.
The
teachers I visited were working within that rich tradition. They provided
example after different example of people doing public intellectual work in
institutional settings, using the power of the institution to realize
democratic goals for the children in their charge, and finessing, negotiating,
subverting institutional power when it blocked the realization of those goals.
At a time of profound disillusionment with public institutional life, these
people were, in their distinct ways, creating the conditions for children to
develop lives of possibility.
-
From Possible Lives:
The Promise of Public Education in America, 1995/2006, pp. 412-413
II.
So much
depends on what you look for and how you look for it. In the midst of the
reform debates and culture wars that swirl around schools; the fractious,
intractable school politics; the conservative assault on public institutions;
and the testing, testing, testing— in the midst of all this, it is easy to lose
sight of the broader purpose of the common public school. For me, that purpose
is manifest in the everyday detail of classrooms, the words and gestures of a
good teacher, the looks on the faces of students thinking their way through a
problem.
We have so little of such detail in
our national discussion of teaching, learning, or the very notion of public
education itself. It has all become a contentious abstraction. But detail gives
us the sense of a place, something that can get lost in policy discussions
about our schools—or, for that matter, in so much of our national discussion
about ourselves. Too often, we deal in broad brushstrokes about regions, about
politics and economics, about racial, linguistic, and other social
characteristics. Witness the red state– blue state distinction, one that, yes,
tells us something quick and consequential about averages, but misses so much
about local social and political dynamics, the lived civic variability within.
The details of classroom life
convey, in a specific and physical way, the intellectual work being done day to
day across the nation—the feel and clatter of teaching and learning. I’m
thinking right now of a scene in a chemistry class in Pasadena, California,
that I observed. The students had been conducting experiments to determine the
polarity of various materials. Some were washing test tubes, holding them up to
the windows for the glint of sunlight, checking for a bad rinse. Some were
mixing salt and water to prepare one of their polar materials. Some were
cautiously filling droppers with hydrochloric acid or carbon tetrachloride. And
some were stirring solutions with glass rods, squinting to see the results.
There was lots of chatter and lots of questions for the teacher, who walked
from student to student, asking what they were doing and why, and what they
were finding out.
The students were learning about the
important concept of polarity. They were also learning to be systematic and
methodical. And moving through the room was the teacher, asking questions,
responding, fostering a scientific cast of mind. This sort of classroom scene
is not uncommon. And collectively, such moments give a palpable sense of what
it means to have, distributed across a nation, available by law to all, a
public educational system to provide the opportunity for such intellectual
development.
-
From Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us,
2009/2014, pp. 201-203
III.
Classrooms
are powerful places. They can be the sites of numbing boredom and degradation
or of growth and connection. …I have
strong feelings about classrooms. I like them, feel at home in them. I like the
banter, the crayons and pencils and scratching of pens, the smell of
watercolors and acrylics, the quiet of concentration, the bustle of students
thinking something through. The classroom is the place of my life’s work, the
long haul, layered with emotion and memory. It doesn’t take much to call forth
the wisps of childhood alienation and loneliness ̶ the pages of a worn textbook, a kid’s
slumping posture, the whiff of disinfectant ̶
or sometimes, in rapid shift, feelings of delicate hope and admiration
for a teacher’s or student’s courage, quickness, humanity. Some of the most
significant encounters of my late adolescence and young adulthood took place in
classrooms, and it was in classrooms that I appropriated powerful bodies of knowledge
and methods of inquiry. As I moved from student to teacher, I came of age in
these rooms, realizing things about my own abilities and limits, my talent and
fragility, the interplay of understanding and uncertainty that defines
teaching, the sheer hard human work of it. I have been privy to remarkable
moments, spent untold hours with people ̶
from elementary school children to adults in literacy programs ̶ as they acquired knowledge and new skill,
played with ideas and struggled to understand, reached tentatively across
divides, felt the grounded satisfaction of achievement, raged against history
and moved toward clarity and resolve. A democracy, I believe, cannot leave the
conditions for such experience to chance
̶ or, for that matter, to the
vagaries of political climate and market forces, for as Walter Lippmann
observed, “the market is, humanly speaking, a ruthless sovereign.” A society
that defines itself as free and open is obligated to create and sustain the
public space for this kind of education to occur across the full, broad sweep
of its citizenry.
-
From Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in
America, 1995/2006, pp. 6-7
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