Bill Ayers

24 Love Letters to Maxine Greene

(In no particular order)

Followed by 7 Questions

Dear Maxine,

I’m wandering along an open road tonight, wobbly and a bit unhinged, wondering where I’ll be by morning, writing you now under a sea of stars. You’re on my mind 24/7—I love you, you know—and here’s a simple sampling of letters from the day, one every hour, followed by a week’s worth of questions:

1)      Your eyes, yes, why not? Laughing eyes, and worried too. Wonderful eyes, burning day and night, aware, alert eyes.

2)      A sense rumbling beneath every conversation: you’re just waking up, at this very moment—this morning’s news! That cab-driver’s comment! The piece on the war in the New Yorker! Rachel Madow! The show at the Public! Bill T. Jones! Rashid Khalidi on Charlie Rose! Brecht!—and you’re breaking loose. You’re speaking to me (I know it’s a narcissistic illusion, but I allow myself, why not?) as if I’m just waking up too, and in our first waking moments I must pay urgent attention, gather whatever courage I can, and prepare to break loose as well.

3)      You offer me a bowl of soup and a bed for the night—me, the natural narcissism again, why not?—but you offer a bite and a bed for the night to many others, including the homeless man on 5^th Avenue one night in a snow storm (my hopeful invitation in perspective!) and his aggressive rejection: What do you want from me lady?

4)      Your crazy question after that lecture: Was it OK? It was, yes, it was surely OK. It was only words after all—let’s not make more of it than it was—conceived and constructed and spoken by you for perhaps an hour, a bit more, in a crowded    room, a stuffy place at the start. And yet people who heard you were gasping throughout, some weeping, some laughing and reaching out to touch another’s hand. The air sizzled and crackled, until, as you would have it, fresh and startling winds began to blow through the room. No one left quite the same, not even you. It was OK—why not?

5)      Your one persistent rule, which is to reach, and your dazzling embodiment of the practice of it, the effort of it, trying again and again to speak beyond barriers and without bounds, to stretch, to reach.

6)      Those exaggerations, those excesses—all the little efforts and grand gestures, and why not, designed to clear the air of hum-drum, ho-hum, and all the tedious repetition and buzz.

7)      The admonition to create—right here and right now, in this community or in this school or on this corner—a place to do philosophy, and a bit of the possible world we might want to inhabit.

8)      Your inner rhythm: Wake up! Be astonished! Act! Doubt! (REPEAT!)

9)      Storming all those habitual barricades, the impositions and constraints, especially your own.

10)  Reminding us again what it means to be alive and in dialogue with others, unfinished and situated, in-motion and struggling to expand the public square as a place of balance and decency, human dignity and possibility.

11)  Your sense that we are all necessarily blind to our own blind spots, anesthetized, sleepy, and in need of occasional jolts and shocks into new awarenesses.

12)  Your contradictions and conflicts, your reversals, dialectcs.

13)  Another world—not necessarily a better world, possibly much worse, but another world nonetheless—is inevitable: Imagine a possible world you’d like to live in. Why not?

14)  All the echoes: Arendt and Camus and DuBois, for example, Addams and King and Horton, Ginsberg, Shelly, Hughes and Brooks. Orwell. Morrison. Saramago. DeLillo. Woolf. That wild unruly company you keep.

15)  Your invitations—to try once to construct a classroom on a base of fearless and relentless inquiry, for example, every established and received bit of wisdom, common sense, and dogma open for examination, interrogation, and rethinking.

16)  Your impatience with gurus of every stripe, and with anyone who would pin you, like a beautiful butterfly, to that particular board.

17)  Your invitations—to change the world, for example, or to change the people who will change the world.

18)  Embracing the rebels again and again, and glimpsing the ghost of Dewey behind the barricades.

19)  Imagining a classroom where all the messages, implicit and explicit, are built on the idea that we are swirling through history, alive and acute, that nothing is guaranteed, and that we are each a work-in-progress and an artist-in-residence, swimming shakily toward an uncertain shore.

20)  That elaborate and painful-looking tattoo you inspired on the inside of my student’s small wrist: I am…not yet.

21)  Your endless invitations—to act out the possibility that school, for example, far from being a preparation for life, is indeed life itself,.

22)  Your open meditation concerning the fear of imagination, the fear of choice and free will, that characterizes the people who are drunk on power, or to the men of facts without ethics, or to those cynics who can tell you the price of everything but the value of nothing. Your Dickensian dystopic description of the degradation that marks the classroom as slave galley where the teacher’s central task is to beat the drum mindlessly: “When thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by, dost thou think that thou wilt always kill the robber Fancy lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him!”

23)  Your self-designated task to follow the town crier through all the quiet streets as he puts the people to sleep with his constant, “All’s well” and to contradict that soothing lie: All is certainly not well, you say, lighting altogether different lamps for the night.

24)  Your invitations—to dive into the wreckage, for example.

Questions:

What does it mean to be human in the 21st century?

How can teachers who feel shackled, bound and gagged, develop a pedagogy of alert engagement with and activism for humanity—something that tries to tell the truth, tries to stand against violence and war and exploitation and oppression, tries to act in fairness and balance and peace, and tries to enact the power of love that does justice?

How can we look at the world of children—the sufferings, the accomplishments, the perspectives, the concerns—and develop an awareness, sometimes joyous but just as often painful, of all that we find; how do we account for every person, each entangled and propelled, and sometimes made mute, by large social forces, each with a wild and vast inner life—a spirit, a mind, a future?

How can we forge ourselves into artisans of a new humanity?

What are our wildest dreams?

What are you planning to do now?

What should I do with the rest of my life?

Bill

Maxine Greene passed away yesterday. Every single time I saw Maxine, she picked up the conversation exactly where we had last left it, as if I were one of only 6 people who had been in her apartment in the intervening months. But she had talked to hundreds, exchanged letters and notes and phone calls with hundreds more. “Did you finish that article on…?” “Do you still think Obama is…?” “How is your sister, Miriam?” “When Carol was here, we talked about Bill’s new book – have you read it?” There are only a few who know how to live life so fully. Salons. Students. Concerts. Lectures. Reading up. Dressing down. Imagining the possible for our children…and their children.

As so-and-so in this novel by so-and-so, she would say, as if all of us were as intimately familiar with the characters of every book written in the past 200 years as she was…But it didn’t matter. The quotation from the fictional character captured the point perfectly, brought us to those places in our imagination that so often so often pass unnoticed and yet, when given the attention they deserve, nourish our curiosity and the sense of the possible. She inspired teachers and scholars alike, in fact blurring that very distinction.

Mary Oliver:
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

Maxine, a mentor and friend to so many of us, lived a wild and precious life.

MAXINE GREENE was at the forefront of educational philosophy for well over half a century as a teacher, a lecturer and author.

She was the Founder and Director of the Center for Social Imagination, the Arts and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University where she has been on the faculty since 1965 serving as Professor of Philosophy and Education since 1973 and the William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education from 1975 to 1998, and was Professor Emeritus. Since 1976, she had served as the Director of Teachers College-Lincoln Center Project in the Arts and Humanities: “Philosopher in Residence,” Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts in Education. From 1966 to 1973, she served at the Editor of the Teachers College Record. From 1962 to 1965, she was an Associate Professor of Education at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. Between 1949 and 1962, she taught at New York University serving as an Instructor of Philosophy and History of Education and Associate Professor of English Education; and was an Assistant Professor of English at Montclair State College in 1956-1957.

Maxine Greene lectured widely at universities and educational associations throughout the United States, and was a past President of the Philosophy of Education Society and the American Educational Studies Association, and the American Educational Research Association. She also served on the Executive Council of the John Dewey Society, the Evaluation Committee for the Department of Curriculum at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, the National Council of Teachers of English, the Modern English Language Association and the American Philosophical Association. In 1984, she was elected to the National Academy of Education and received Educator of the Year Awards from Columbia University and Ohio State University.

She was the author of six books: Releasing the Imagination – Essays on Education, the Arts and Social Change (Jossey Bass Publishers, 1995); The Dialectics of Freedom (Teachers College Press, 1988); Landscapes of Learning (Teachers College Press, 1978); Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy in the Modern Age (Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1973), which was awarded the 1974 Delta Gamma Kappa Award for Educational Book of the Year; Existential Encounters for Teachers (Random House, 1967); and The Public School and the Private Vision (Random House, 1963). Her monographs included Active Learning and Aesthetic Encounters (Talks at the Lincoln Center Institute, NCREST, 1994); A Teacher Talks to Teachers: Perspectives on the Lincoln Center Institute (Lincoln Center, 1980); and Education, Freedom and Possibility (Russell Lecture, 1975).

Maxine Greene held a PhD (1955) and M.A. (1949) from New York University and a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University (1938) in addition to nine honorary degrees from universities across the country.

Selected Publications

Books Include:

*  Variations on a Blue Guitar (Teachers College Press, 2001)
*  Releasing the Imagination – Essays on Education, the Arts and Social Change (Jossey Bass Publishers, 1995)
*  The Dialectic of Freedom (Teachers College Press, 1988)
*  Landscapes of Learning (Teachers College Press, 1978)
*  Teacher as Stranger: Educational Philosophy in the Modern Age (Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1973)
*  Existential Encounters for Teachers (Random House, 1967)
*  The Public School and the Private Vision (Random House, 1963)

Monographs include:

*  Active Learning and Aesthetic Encounters (Talks at the Lincoln Center Institute, NCREST, 1994)
*  A Teacher Talks to Teachers: Perspectives on the Lincoln Center Institute (Lincoln Center, 1980)
*  Education, Freedom and Possibility (Russell Lecture, 1975)

Please visit Maxine.Greene’s web site for details: http://www.maxinegreene.org/books.php

Teacher, mentor, visionary activist and friend.

She lives on in the many people she touched with her dazzling mind and her generous embrace.

I miss her very much.

Dale Russsakoff’s thorough report on the Newark schools rescue (5/19/2014) contains echoes from social reform efforts a century ago. When Cory Booker, Newark’s “rock-star mayor,” calls for top-down reform because an open political process would be messy and could potentially be “taken captive” by opponents, he sounds eerily like the social reformer John Purroy Mitchell, the wondrous “Boy Mayor” of New York City in 2014. Convinced of his own pure motives and good heart, uniquely capable of wielding “sophisticated data” to transform the lives of the down-trodden and the new immigrants, Mitchell never bothered to consult the folks he was uplifting. Neither mayor thought serious participation could be a positive force in their grand plans, neither encouraged broad participation, neither appeared to believe that the people with the problems are essential to crafting the solutions nor that the dilemmas and messes in a democracy are best addressed through more, not less, democracy. It’s a long tradition—child-savers, social engineers, Lady Bountiful—and it rests on an ugly assumption: only “the best and the brightest” are endowed with a sufficiently deep understanding of history or are capable of exercising their own agency, while the rest of us can be written off by our statistical profiles: age, race, income, and place of residence. Mitchell was driven from office after a single term, and the New Republic concluded that people had “revolted against the consequences to themselves of government by capable and disinterested experts,” an undemocratic “autocracy of experts.” The election of Ras Baracka is one more echo.

William Ayers

The call for “trigger warnings”—a recent censorious trend gaining traction on American college campuses—is designed to alert students of any potentially troubling, unsettling, or upsetting course materials. The impetus is benign enough, and the context includes the important recent mobilization to deal seriously with epidemic levels of rape and sexual assault on campuses across the country. But objections to this trend are also clear: art and literature, education and growth are characteristically disturbing. When a few years ago Judith Shapiro, president of Barnard College, told a faculty meeting dealing with the discomfort some students experienced when exposed to criticisms of Israel that she thought no Barnard student should be uncomfortable in any class, I thought she had lost her way if not her mind. As a professor my goal was that every student would find in my classes every day the familiar and the strange, the comforting and the discomfiting—and I wanted to find those things for myself as well. I mostly wanted everyone to be moved to leap forward, to launch themselves into the going world, and to embark on voyages into the unknown.

The trigger warning—if it is to be used at all—should appear on the application to college itself: Please be aware that you will be challenged here, you will be exposed to ideas you cannot now imagine, you will experience times of cognitive dissonance and intellectual vertigo, and you will likely be transformed in some unscripted and unpredictable ways. If that doesn’t appeal to you, stay home in the comfort of your couch and your familiar books and things.

Oh, and if that set includes the Bible, here’s a trigger warning for that: This good book contains graphic scenes of murder including patricide and matricide, fratricide and genocide (spoiler alert: in the serial genocides that occur in the opening chapters, God takes the wrong side every time), rape including gang rapes and incestuous rape and child rape, torture, tribal warfare, human sacrifice, and slavery—if any of that might trigger bad feelings or icky reactions, stick to the Bible Stories for Children. It’s so much more comforting

The call for “trigger warnings”—a recent censorious trend gaining traction on American college campuses—is designed to alert students of any potentially troubling, unsettling, or upsetting course materials. The impetus is benign enough, and the context includes the important recent mobilization to deal seriously with epidemic levels of rape and sexual assault on campuses across the country. But objections to this trend are also clear: art and literature, education and growth are characteristically disturbing. When a few years ago Judith Shapiro, president of Barnard College, told a faculty meeting dealing with the discomfort some students experienced when exposed to criticisms of Israel that she thought no Barnard student should be uncomfortable in any class, I thought she had lost her way if not her mind. As a professor my goal was that every student would find in my classes every day the familiar and the strange, the comforting and the discomfiting—and I wanted to find those things for myself as well. I mostly wanted everyone to be moved to leap forward, to launch themselves into the going world, and to embark on voyages into the unknown.

The trigger warning—if it is to be used at all—should appear on the application to college itself: Please be aware that you will be challenged here, you will be exposed to ideas you cannot now imagine, you will experience times of cognitive dissonance and intellectual vertigo, and you will likely be transformed in some unscripted and unpredictable ways. If that doesn’t appeal to you, stay home in the comfort of your couch and your familiar books and things.

Oh, and if that set includes the Bible, here’s a trigger warning for that: This good book contains graphic scenes of murder including patricide and matricide, fratricide and genocide (spoiler alert: in the serial genocides that occur in the opening chapters, God takes the wrong side every time), rape including gang rapes and incestuous rape and child rape, torture, tribal warfare, human sacrifice, and slavery—if any of that might trigger bad feelings or icky reactions, stick to the Bible Stories for Children. It’s so much more comforting

The 1% went collectively ecstatic and typically nuts when the brilliant Uruguayan writer and thinker said in an interview at a book fair in Brazil that he found the prose he wrote more than 40 years ago “extremely leaden,” and that over these decades “reality has changed a lot, and I have changed a lot.”
It’s a far cry from these mild comments—from the criticism of earlier writing and style which every author I know shares, to the self-evident statement about change—to the claim of the New York Times that he “disavowed” the book, or to a right-wing Cuban exile blogging that “Galeano Corrects Himself and the Idiots Lose Their Bible.”
I have no use for Bibles in any form, but if you want to understand the sorry state we’re in and the intensifying crisis ahead, Open Veins is worth revisiting. Beautifully written—with some leaden prose no doubt—passionately felt, wise in a thousand ways, it offers a powerful indictment of imperialism and the escalating destruction before us. Get it from Monthly Review Press.

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, expanding my sense of the lengthening legacy of slavery. It inspired me to read again Benito Cereno, Herman Melville’s classic tale of the blinding light of white supremacist assumptions, and the continuing arrogance of the powerful who see in themselves qualities such as taste and history and agency, but construct the rest of us as statistical profiles: age, income, ethnicity, gender, race—and never agency.

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 National Historic Site because of its significance in the famous 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in public schools, Brown v. Board of Education. The National Archives includes several documents from the case in its digital classroom.

Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessey v. Ferguson and heralded the legal termination of racially segregated schools; it’s become an icon in the popular story America tells itself about its inherent goodness and its inevitable upward trajectory: America the beautiful; Brown as sign and symbol. Americans are devoted to Brown, myth or icon, just as we’re dedicated to Superman’s motto: Truth, Justice, and the American Way. But “Power concedes nothing without a demand,” as Frederick Douglass said. “It never has and it never will.”

Brown was decided in the wake of World War II, in the wash of that reenergized sense of freedom, and, critically, with the return of young Black veterans from Europe and Asia. Whenever you read or hear that Brown unleashed years of struggle for civil rights, flip the script and remind people that years of struggle for civil rights resulted in Brown. The decision followed incessant and increasingly intense demands and mobilizations by African-Americans that the country live up to the promise of full citizenship encoded in the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

And Brown coincided with clear white interests that had nothing to do with Black well-being: avoiding a revolution led and defined by subjugated African-Americans; transforming the feudal South and integrating it into a repositioned capitalist juggernaut; removing a blatant hypocrisy and an embarrassing fact of American life that was effectively wielded against the US in the UN and other international forums as an escalating Cold War raged on. White people needed Brown—but only a bit of Brown.

The language of Brown includes the language of justice. It repudiates racial segregation and says—correctly—that separate is inherently unequal. It affirms the full humanity of African Americans. It endorses core principles of democracy. It cries out for equality.

To take Brown to heart would require a hard look at the racial landscape we inhabit—a system with institutions operating at every level to construct Black “inferiority” and to deny full participation in social and political and economic life. That hard look could lead to an iron commitment, then, to smash the institution of white supremacy. No such luck—yet.

Brown also embodies a fundamental, even a fatal, flaw that runs deep in the American racial narrative. The argument in the case turns on the harm suffered by Black children and the feelings of inferiority that are a result of segregation, rather than the despicable, immoral, and destructive system of white supremacy itself. Black people—not racism—became the exclusively acknowledged concern; Black pathology, not white privilege, was the focus of action.

And so Brown, the widely celebrated and lofty statement of principle, was followed immediately by its lesser-known brother, the betrayer and assassin, Brown II. Brown II was the implementation phase of the decision, and here again—consistent with the long tradition of all things racial in America—the remedy fitted neither the crime nor the injury. In fact Brown II gave local school districts, the parties defeated in Brown, the power and responsibility to construct the solution—to desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” The fox—far from being banished from the hen house—was given the only set of keys.

The Supreme Court had never in history issued an order to implement a constitutional right that was so vague, and “all deliberate speed” turned out in practice to mean “never.” The activity in the courts over the decades following Brown went decidedly south: racially isolated communities of color were denied the right to draw students from adjoining white suburbs; children were denied the right to equal school funding; the concept of “neighborhood school” was reinforced and strengthened even if the result was re-segregation; on and on and on. Recently the Supreme Court ruled against voluntary desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville in which race was one of several factors used to maintain a diverse student body in public schools. Almost 60 years after Brown, school segregation is alive and well, more firmly entrenched than ever, and each year schools are more segregated. Brown is all but dead, and the structure of white supremacy rules.

As usual white supremacy is hiding in plain sight. The most dissembling hypocrites—Chief Justice Roberts (there’s an oxymoron!) among them—argue that anyone who sees race is a racist, that race-conscious integration is the equivalent of Black-hating segregation—an invented and wholly fictitious symmetry.

The problem in America is not and has never been race consciousness per se; the problem has always been white supremacy in fact. Anything that undermines white supremacy and fights for inclusion and equality sides with humanity; anything that excludes, segregates, or subordinates is on the side of oppression and exploitation. And so, using the lofty language of Brown, ordinary white supremacists continue to herd Black children into unnatural and inferior schools, build walls, and lock the gates.

Monroe Elementary—that iconic temple in Topeka elevated as a National Historic Site—may as well be turned into a mausoleum: here is one more place where African-American aspirations and the on-going struggle for justice and liberation were laid to rest. But it’s not over. The struggle continues.