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Teaching Toward Freedom: Early Childhood Education and the Challenges Ahead The early childhood community has long been the proprietor of a particularly precious ideal--the belief that education at its best is an enterprise geared to helping every human being reach the full measure of his or her humanity, inviting people on a journey to become more thoughtful and more capable, more powerful and courageous, more exquisitely human in their projects and their pursuits. That ideal--always revolutionary, and never more so than today--is central to achieving a democratic and open society. And like democracy itself, it is an ideal that is never quite finished, never easily or finally summed up--it is neither a commodity with readily recognized features nor a product for consumption. No. Rather democracy, like education, is an aspiration to be continually nourished, engaged and exercised, a dynamic, expansive experiment that must be achieved over and over again by every individual and each successive generation if it is to live at all. This is what makes teaching so exhilarating and so exhausting, so dazzling and so ordinary, so lofty and so low at the same time. Teachers live this tension with intense urgency--we meet our students as we are and as they are, right here and right now, finite but incomplete; we enlarge and expand in order to engage their minds and fire their hearts, to provoke their imaginations and our own. We jump into our work headfirst; we toil in the common fields while we hold open the possibility of something more, something transcendent--enlightenment, perhaps, and liberation. Each morning, as we rise and venture toward a new day, and later, as we approach our classrooms, we might remind ourselves that a teacher's destination is always the same: that special spot between heaven and earth, that plain but spectacular space where we might once again try to teach toward freedom. A paradox of teaching We teachers realize immediately that we are somehow over our heads, beyond ourselves. This is one of the paradoxes of teaching; we find ourselves asked to teach when we ourselves are uncertain, incomplete, not quite sure. When I was first teaching--in the first hour on the very first morning--a five-year-old boy asked me why the ball bounced. I knew I was in trouble. Before that day was done I was challenged to consider the blueness of the sky, the sticky residue from spilled juice, and the phenomenon of a man sleeping in a doorway on our way to the park. Why? Why? Why? When my oldest child was five, and we were riding together on a crowded New York City bus, he asked in a loud voice, "Poppy, what's a kike?" I froze. Where had he heard such a word? "I read it," he replied proudly. "See?" Sure enough, there it was--a large, red slash of graffiti: "I hate kikes!" punctuated with a swastika. I pulled myself together: "Kike" is a word full of hatred, I said, a lying word used to hurt Jews, a violent word, a word we always oppose. "Aren't you going to cross it out?" he said plainly. Shoot, man, I wanted to say. Haven't I done enough? But, of course, I couldn't and didn't, and so instead I pulled a magic marker from my pack and obliterated the hateful stain, and the bus riders gave me a restrained ovation. It was not the first time--and not the last--that an encounter with a student or a child asked me to be smarter than I am and better than I am. I'm not that smart. I'm not that good. But there and then I had to be. And I learned something: We teach to learn, we teach to stretch, we teach next to, not above, our students. The gift of time In a lovely French documentary film called To Be and to Have (2003) we meet Georges Lopez, a middle-aged, one-room-schoolhouse teacher in rural France caring for a dozen or so youngsters who appear to range in age from five or six to about twelve. The film opens with a long, still shot of the empty classroom--chairs on desks, brightly painted pictures everywhere, plants, photographs, pencils and markers. It is the classroom at rest, and one anticipates a sudden explosion of youthful energy as the day begins. But the camera lingers. And then, without fanfare, a turtle steps out from beneath a bookshelf, and then another. We watch the two plod slowly across the floor in a ponderous point, counterpoint. The dance of the turtles is a metaphor for Lopez's teaching: things are slow, nothing is hurried. In a world of instant everything, of moving sidewalks and staircases, of fast food and processed words, Lopez acknowledges that the growth of a human being takes time. There is time to become deeply involved, time to pursue projects, time to make and correct mistakes, and time to resolve the little conflicts that will always erupt in a group. There is little evidence of the characteristic superficial encounter and the hurried plan--minutes here, minutes there--the curriculum of "I know; you don't know." All five senses are engaged, big kids helping younger students, everyone with responsibilities, expectations, jobs, goals, and limits. There's a palpable feel of growth and change, an exhilaration that our classroom now is not as it was yesterday, nor as it will be tomorrow, and neither are the students or the teacher. They are on a voyage with no clear beginning and no end in sight. Teaching virtues As far as the education of children goes, rather than teach what Natalia Ginzberg, the Italian novelist, calls "the little virtues," we might aspire to teach the great ones. Not thrift, for example, but generosity, not caution but courage, not tact but love for our neighbors, and not a longing for success but a desire to know and to be. The great virtues come from some deep and hard-to-name place, an instinct, perhaps, but it is clear that with their development the little virtues will fall into their proportionate place. Teachers must think about the environments they create; they must examine them, reflect upon them, and then rethink and reconstruct them. What would an environment built around the great virtues look like? The preschool wizard Vivian Gussin Paley wrote a wise book called You Can't Say You Can't Play (1992) illuminating the central place of moral reflection and ethical action in the kindergarten. How would a teacher create a space where the great virtues were visible and available, modeled and rehearsed, enacted and demonstrated? Take the last great virtue in Ginzberg's list, a desire to know and to be. Surely a teacher with that in mind would recognize the importance of nourishing a sense of confidence and competence, feelings of self-love combined with compassion and empathy for others--to be ethical is not to be perfect, but it is to strive for awareness, to choose, to try. Two crucial tasks of teachers Committed and aware teachers must endeavor to accomplish two crucial tasks. One is to convince students, often against a background of having attended what we might call "obedience training school," that there is no such thing as receiving an education as a passive receptor or an inert vessel--in that direction lies nothing but subservience, indoctrination, and worse. All real education is and must always be self-education. The second task is to demonstrate to students, and to yourself, through daily effort and interaction, that they are valued, that their humanity is honored, and that their growth, enlightenment, and liberation are the paramount concern. We take the side of the student. The fundamental message of the teacher--the graduate school lecturer, the high school biology teacher, the preschool teacher, and everyone in between--is this: You can change your life. The good teacher provides recognition, and holds out the possibility of growth and a change in direction, the possibility of a new and different outcome: Here's a sonnet, a formula, an equation, a way of seeing or figuring or imagining. Take hold of your life, engage the world, and you must change. We notice that our students are endowed with active minds, restless bodies, dynamic hearts and spirits. They are on the go. And full of surprises. Each brings a unique set of experiences and capacities to class, and each is filled with his or her own hopes and aspirations. Do we know what they are? How can we find out? We begin by standing with , not above, our students. We share their predicaments, and we do so in solidarity with them. We look beyond deficits to assets and capacities, strengths and abilities, something solid that we can build upon. We seek some common ground to pursue growth and development. None of our students is fixed or motionless, none entirely quiet or still--and if they appear thus, it is an illusion. This is how we might see them: as unruly sparks of meaning-making energy on a voyage of discovery through life. They are poised to change. So are we. William Ayers, Ph.D. is Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, author of The Good Preschool Teacher and, most recently, Teaching Toward Freedom . He spoke at the Winnetka Alliance's 15th Annual Networking Dinner in January. This article contains excerpts from his speech.
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