Freedom
“A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.”
Table of Contents:
1. Freedom is loss
2. Freedom and Constraint
3. Freedom and Confrontation
4. Freedom and Guidance
5. Freedom and Power
6. Freedom and Expectation
7. Freedom and Exploitation
8. Freedom and Oppression
9. Freedom and Community
10. Freedom and Uncertainty
11. Freedom and Pain
12. Freedom and Liberation
“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose Nothin’, don’t mean nothin’ hon’ if it ain’t free, no no And, feelin’ good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues You know, feelin’ good was good enough for me Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.”
1. Freedom is loss.
Without that tangled web of relationships and responsibilities we are all born into, what meaning would our life hold? Absent those constraints, how would we make choices? How could anything matter? Freedom, the absence of relationships and responsibilities, is loss. Yet we proclaim with pride in the United States of America that this is the Land of the Free. What is this Freedom, and what lessons does it hold for K-12 students and their teachers? Perhaps we don’t actually seek Freedom after all; perhaps what we actually seek is self-determination.
When all of our connections have been cut and there is nothing tying us down, the only meaningful thing to do is to become a seeker . . . to look for some system of constraint that will receive us and appreciate our gifts.
It may be worth considering:
Is it useful to you to think of your students as seekers?
Do you believe your students could be inspired by this role, by assuming this mantle?
Does this change the way you relate to them?
2. Freedom and Constraint
Fortunately, freedom in practical terms is never absolute; it is “freedom from _______” (fill in a constraint). This more limited freedom is reactionary and thereby rich in meaning. Hitting the open road is satisfying as long as we revel in the absence of the daily grind, but it fails to nourish us if we do nothing meaningful or productive with all this free time. On a stressful day at work, I will remember with momentary grief the relatively carefree days of my youth, roaming around Europe and Africa on a bicycle, until I remember also the terrifying sense of meaninglessness I felt then, and my intense despair at building or creating what felt like . . . nothing.
I set out on that trip after flunking out of college, reduced to utter despair at having jumped the rails of expectation and humiliated by a sense of abject failure. Facing the Cascade d’Ouzoud in the Atlas Mountains of southern Morocco after a year of adventure, when I had had it with the rootlessness and otherness of wandering and had committed myself to a new career, I consciously rejected Freedom in favor of Meaning. The mantle of this aspiration came with constraints as well as comforts, but what mattered to me most at the time was that it offered Purpose. I did not know if I would be suited to this new career, and so the decision felt more risky than revelatory. At least it offered more than the empty hedonism of wandering, though. It offered Love—the possibility of loving what I did, and a chance to better love myself.
Only in retrospect did it occur to me that this year spent wandering would be one of the most consequential and meaningful experiences of my life—that I had in fact recreated my very sense of self. Freedom and loss were my invitation to self-discovery and re-invention. Knowing this, it is particularly exasperating to see schools expand instead of contract their requirements. How can there be self-discovery and self-realization within a suffocating mayonnaise of mandates? Students may learn about other things, perhaps, but self-discovery is unlikely. I hope that we have put to rest the horrifying idea that school is just about learning about other things.
Constraints must be offered, not imposed. Concisely, that defines the failure of our system of scholastic constraints. Self-determination is what we need and crave—the freedom to choose our constraints. Self-determination unleashes the resilience and enthusiasm that are precursors to success.
It may be worth considering:
How might you loosen the reins of requirements and afford students real, expansive choices?
How might you help them to imagine unique pathways and outcomes?
How might your own conceptions about life limit what your students understand as possible?
3. Freedom and Confrontation
When I returned to Africa 30 years later, this time to cross the Sahara on my bicycle, I did so with a very different frame of mind. On this trip, I was more constrained (my lovely wife was inflexible on three points: 3 months maximum, come back in one piece and no shenanigans), but I was also more inspired than my previous visit. Years of National Geographic pictorials, and an old Michelin map showing just one red line through the vast desolation of the Sahara, made the trip feel epic. I had learned that fear foretold activities of importance and growth, and I had learned to heed its call. Besides confirming my belief that people are wonderful everywhere, the trip taught me a thing or two about myself. In a remote desert, broken bicycles and dwindling water supplies forge new neural pathways.
Without the adversity and challenge, all that freedom would have been meaningless to me. The trip would have lacked adventure. Forced upon me out of context, however, those challenges might easily have left me resentful. Only because I brought those challenges upon myself, because I was firmly committed to the trip with my senses fully engaged and the adversity was merely a by-product of my own choices and a higher goal, only under those circumstances could I take on the setbacks with a (usually) positive state of mind. I engaged. Self-determination made all that freedom fruitful.
It may be worth considering:
How often are the challenges facing students arbitrary or unrelated to their explicitly articulated, self-determined goals?
How often do you explicitly ask students to articulate their goals?
How do you help your students defend themselves against challenges that do not serve them?
4. Freedom and Guidance
Defining goals, making choices, and overcoming the obstacles that ensue—these require guidance. My daughter, for example, spent her early adolescence in a school without constraints and confrontations. She could attend classes or not, engage with teachers or not, study or not, and concern herself with acquiring knowledge or with self-expression or with hanging out with her friends. The school was remarkably passive in offering direction or attracting attention or coaxing engagement, and my daughter was cast adrift; she felt she was heading nowhere. She could not escape the cultural glorification of college and considered this her destination, but felt unprepared to bushwhack her way there. She needed guidance. We, her parents, with 14 years of higher education between us, could not convince her that exploring her own interests while she was young and unencumbered would be more valuable than surrendering to a well-beaten college-preparatory track. We felt conflicted ourselves, and in the end helped her transfer to a college preparatory private school. She encountered her fair share of challenges, but succeeded in what mattered to her most: getting into a better than average college. Asked 10 years later if she regretted sacrificing the freedom of that original school, my daughter instead recalled drifting without purpose or meaning.
It may be worth considering:
On the continuum between mandates (students do as they are told) and dreams (who knows what will emerge…), how much control are you willing to cede to your students?
Are you content to preach, or are you ready to coach?
5. Freedom and Power
Our educational system comes crammed with constraints. It imposes codes of behavior, structures of curriculum, systems of accountability, and categories with labels . . . so many imposed and indelible diagnostic tattoos. “I am…”. “I have…” The system places a high value on order and rules, smothering self-determination with institutional expectations. Mandates increase instead of decrease—more testing, more accountability, more passivity, more time away from engaging activities. The value system is undeniable: don’t rock the boat.
Consider instead an environment that encourages and empowers students to temporarily inhabit disguises and avatars in a spirit of play. It would invite students to sample systems of possibility and constraint instead of imposing those constraints a priori. This is a system we call mathematics, for example, and here are some of the rules, but look at what remains to be discovered! This is a system we call politics, designed to manage the aspirations and interactions among all of us. Look at all the problems it has resolved, and all the problems we all get into. This is a system we call history. Are there any rules, or are there only perspectives?
The transcendentalists teach us that identity is all a story anyway, one we write and rewrite in the quest for meaning, even into adulthood. To play with identity and hold it lightly, consider the power and freedom of that perspective!
Instead of simply imposing constraints, it may be more useful to set the stage by:
1. Reinforcing a sense of tolerance, safety and responsibility for each other
2. Confirming that your kids feel seen and heard
3. Inviting students to sample systems of possibility and constraint
4. Explicitly exploring meaning and possibility, and not just functionality
5. Offering maps filled with potential relationships and unexplored territories
From there, engaging, exploring and educating
6. Confronting students with measured adversity
7. Carefully nurturing their empowerment as well as their sense of community
8. Celebrating progress
It may be worth considering:
How might you minimize institutionally imposed constraints?
How might you entice and empower students to explore systems of possibility and constraint freely and fearlessly?
6. Freedom and Expectation
The greatest impediment to exploring my own identity was not institutional—it was internal. In every situation I found myself, it seemed the people around me come to understand me in a particular way and this came to feel like an obligation or an unwanted but indelible tattoo. If I avoided this, than it was by staying in motion. My parents moved me from the Netherlands to the United [JE1] States at ages 4 and again at 5, from Illinois to Massachusetts at 8, from elementary school to honors program at 10, to junior high school at 13, and to high school at 15. I naively wandered off to college in New York at 18, spent a year bicycling around Europe and Africa at 20, tried college again in New York at 21, escaped to the Amazon Jungle at 25, worked in North Carolina at 26, tried college and a job in Boston at 27, spent 30 working and studying in Switzerland, finally graduated college in Los Angeles at 31, and chased jobs, projects and adventures all over the world ever since — each dislocation challenging my identity and forcing me re-consider myself. Each move allowed me to shed some dead skin. Transformation without dislocation felt like betrayal or dishonesty on the other hand, so burdened was I by the perceived expectations of everyone around me. I confused growth with inauthenticity.
The expectations of others can blind us to our own wants and keep us from speaking up. They can keep us from deciding things for ourselves and keep us from fully developing our potential. They impose someone else’s will instead of simply offering a useful or inspiring possibility. This theme, of offering instead of imposing, strikes me of absolute importance in the culture of school. To offer is to respect, to impose is to diminish. I cannot imagine anyone in education wanting to diminish a student, and yet imposition is the very stuff of so much schooling: imposition of subjects and schedules and labels and diagnoses and expectations and protocols and sheer work. School will crawl into our minds and set up camp. It will defend all the expectations and evaluations it enforces by saying it will raise the bar and inspire us to greater achievements, and this defense is both powerful and true. However, those achievements will serve goals that are not our own, reducing us to hosting someone else’s agenda instead of taking charge of our own development. This in turn puts us in a very brittle situation, one in which our emotions and our actions sit at cross-purposes and what we want to do and need to do are completely misaligned. This will not end well.
It may be worth considering:
How might you help students to identify and objectively consider the expectations they feel they must fulfill?
How might you even more actively support students in identifying and exploring their interests?
How might you help students to choose their own path and trust the way they feel about it?
7. Freedom and Exploitation
The problem is fear: fear of failure, fear of irrelevance, fear of not getting a job, fear of not meeting expectations . . . so many fears. Parents fear their kids will not succeed (parents know what’s good for you!), industries fear their future workforce won’t be qualified (commerce will tell you how to succeed!), and nations fear decline or subjugation (The government has a STEM career waiting for you!). The intent may not be malicious, but these forces can end up exploiting a student’s unique vulnerability. School may be their only defense.
It will have to be a school that helps students identify these forces and consider them dispassionately. It will be a school with a wide selection of subject matter, giving students agency in selecting what they do. It will be a school that offers guidance without imposing agendas. It will be a school that trumpets what is fascinating about the world without muffling the message with judgments.
Do our schools inoculate students against fear or infect them with it? Do our schools serve the student, or do they serve the parents or industry or the nation? Sometimes what serves one may serve another, so it is not an easy distinction to make.
Perhaps the only way to evaluate the difference is by examining the results. The greater the expressions of individuality and the more varied the choices and achievements of the graduating class, the more likely the teachers have reinforced students in finding or blazing their own unique path. If students all graduate with the same goals, then we might suspect that the teachers have not empowered their students to pursue their own interests. It is suspicious, in other words, to hear a school system crow about “college readiness” or “scholastic achievement” or frankly any simplistic slogan that does not acknowledge and celebrate the extraordinarily diverse pathways our students might take into adulthood.
We live in a complex, problem-plagued world. Teachers serve it better when they encourage students to pursue their own passions fearlessly as opposed to teaching them uniform curriculum. We need to encourage different ways of thinking, because diverse minds solve problems faster and more creatively. We need joyful, engaged students pursuing their own interests because they learn better and faster and will be more powerfully prepared to change the world.
It may be worth considering:
How might you help students to recognize and resist the expectations of others?
How might you help them to identify their own interests and support them in pursuing them?
What might be the differences between inviting students to share your excitement about a subject, offering guidance to them about their future options, and proselytizing in an exploitive way?
8. Freedom and Oppression
When exploitation becomes pervasive and enduring, we call it oppression. When students are required to devote 12 years to a curriculum they do not choose, we instead call it education. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire stated the following:
“One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness. Thus, the behavior of the oppressed is a prescribed behavior, following as it does the guidelines of the oppressor. ”
A Brazilian educator, philosopher, and leading advocate of critical pedagogy who taught among impoverished laborers in northeast Brazil, Freire identified a fear of freedom in those that he served:
“The oppressed suffer from the duality which has established itself in their innermost being. They discover that without freedom they cannot exist authentically. Yet, although they desire authentic existence, they fear it. They are at one and the same time themselves and the oppressor whose consciousness they have internalized. The conflict lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting them; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education must take into account. ”
Freire saw education as a “liberating praxis”: a practical approach to freeing the poor from both internal and external constraints—from cultural and institutional constraints, but also from their own limiting beliefs. Education could free students to choose their own thoughts.
Our system of education is conflicted regarding freedom. We proselytize for capitalism and the American way of life, but also say we are empowering students. We want students to think for themselves, but within certain prescribed parameters. In any case, the students do not set the terms of engagement.
Freire defines education as a dialogue grounded in terms set by the student. The students choose the words that are meaningful to them. Rather than impose a curriculum, Freire (1970) argued for research first to understand what matters to the student, with educators empowering students by organizing them and offering perspective. Educators are thus coaches in games defined by their students. An imposed curriculum would not only be meaningless to the student, it would risk damaging their knowledge and culture.
What do we even mean when we argue for “empowering” students? Are we merely empowering them to succeed within the narrow prescriptions of the economic system we know (to succeed in the world), or are we building the strength, courage, and skill required to truly think for themselves and act accordingly (to change the world)? Perhaps they are not so far apart: success and change. Amazon and Apple and Microsoft: they are successful because they changed the world.
I suspect that we are lying to ourselves about empowerment in any case. I suspect so because we so rarely teach strategy. We do not teach our students to resist or to subvert in a quest for liberation. We do not teach them the street skills of war: to fight, to finesse, to escape, to surrender, or to collude. We do not teach them to exercise these strategies despite their profound desire to connect with their peers and their fear of ostracism. If we truly saw education as a liberating praxis, we would not just offer our students information and perspective, we would teach them to be free. We would show them how. We would set an example.
It may be worth considering:
How do you model freedom?
Ivan Illich, a philosopher and Roman Catholic priest, went even further than Freire to argue for the complete “De-schooling” of society. Illich felt that school institutionalized knowledge at the expense of the individual and condemned entirely the system of public education. He hoped to individualize it through educational credits. Students, in other words, should choose their educational experiences for themselves, and not necessarily within the confines of a school.
“The pupil is… ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. ”
Illich distinguished between acquiring skills, which he maintained we more efficiently accomplish at home, at work, or at play where it is decoupled from the second type of learning, liberal education. Compatible partners interacting directly would most effectively accomplish the latter according to Illich, and these interactions definitely did not need to occur in a formal institutional setting. They did not need to happen in school. Thus, Illich argued for a system of educational credits valid for any activity deemed by the individual to be educational. Freedom, for Illich, depends on freedom from the constraints imposed by institutions like schools.
Illich was sensitive to the blunt manner in which school delivers curriculum, but he was curiously immune to the potential of schools. Why would we teach skills, for example, and not teach the wisdom to use those skills ethically? Was morality one of those constraints to Freedom that Illich decried? Illich also argued for keeping educational attainments out of the hiring process. He reasoned that schooling did not equate with learning, and that self-taught scholars without formal credentials, autodidacts, deserved an equal opportunity to demonstrate skill in getting a job. He appears to reject any possibility that a third-party certification of endurance, resilience, and survival, like a diploma, might speak for qualities demonstrated over time that a single demonstration of skills cannot, and that these attributes might matter to an employer.
Meg Worden reflected deeply on Freedom during her incarceration for drug offenses. She concluded that:
“…the only real freedom is to breathe, to surrender, to choose grace, kindness, love. ”
Acceptance: this was Worden’s choice in prison. It allowed her to appreciate her freedom to think and feel as she chose, even when denied any other agency—not acceptance bordering on despair or frustration, but acceptance focused on freedom. Worden describes Freedom as a choice and as a practice; we chose to embrace grace, for example, and not once but constantly. We practice grace. If school, too, feels so often like prison, then perhaps there is a lesson here for the students. We are all constrained to varying degrees by our roles and responsibilities, but we can focus on our freedoms and channel our need for self-determination.
The difference between Worden, Illich, and Freire is that Worden was sentenced to a 2-year prison term; she could reasonably wait for a more expansive freedom. For the constituents that Freire and Illich served, oppression was a life sentence. We should watch our step at the slippery slope of right and wrong, but let us acknowledge a difference as well between some minor drug offense (with or without a back-story of oppression) and birth into poverty, where the crime is that you exist at all.
It may be worth considering:
How might you teach Freedom as a Practice, even within the institutional constraints of school?
How might you truly empower students to succeed?
To what extent do you teach them to fight, to finesse, to escape, to surrender, or to collude—the street skills of war?
9. Freedom and Community
We humans want freedom but cannot bear exile. As philosopher Søren Kierkegaard pointed out, freedom may seem appealing, but it also causes anxiety. Banishment is brutal.
In The Fear of Freedom, Erich Fromm wrestled with this tension:
“It is the thesis of this book that modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man. ”
Fromm distinguishes “Freedom from (tyranny, the will of others, the vision of others)” and “Freedom to (fully self-actualize)”, pointing out that “Freedom from” will leave us alone, adrift, and vulnerable to the temptations of surrendering to some else’s agenda, in order to regain a sense of belonging. This is especially dangerous when an entire people feel disenfranchised and so powerless at the hands of an elite that they are willing to surrender their autonomy to a cause or a man just to feel some power, if only to oppress those they deem different from themselves. Fromm finds the roots of Nazism in this toxic condition.
“Freedom to”, on the other hand, speaks to individuals fully seizing the ability and the agency to develop themselves. Fromm sees promise in love and work: people in action, expressing themselves openly and uniquely, supported by their relationships. Here there is no need to oppress anyone that is different. This is a Community dedicated to Non-Conformity.
The point Fromm makes is that the Freedom to feel seen and heard is not just of personal importance: it has implications for society as a whole. A class of people that loses the freedom to express itself and develop itself uniquely will submit to Fascism. Only a community empowered to express itself freely will resist this type of fanaticism. If we understand school as an indispensable tool in the never-ending project of building society, then our educational system must take this hard-won lesson to heart. Students must feel celebrated for their differences, and they must be encouraged to explore the opportunities and constraints they uniquely face so that they may sustain a community of non-conformists.
It may be worth considering:
Do your students feel seen and heard?
To what extent do you help your students to celebrate their individual differences?
How might you do that in the face of the rules and expectations students face?
10. Freedom and Uncertainty
We free ourselves from rules and expectations, or we are cast from a community that swears by them, and uncertainty suddenly lays siege upon us. Now what? What do we do with this terrible Freedom?
“Nothing is more powerful and creative than emptiness-from which men shrink.”
Nothing is more powerful and creative because nothing is more appallingly terrifying…and beautiful. The blank page, another empty day, a future without purpose—all demand inordinate courage and a willingness to embrace a different way of being . . . and a belief, an optimism, a confidence that something really cool might emerge.
“The art of living in this predicament is neither careless drifting on the one hand, nor fearful clinging to the past and the known on the other. It consists in being completely sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive…”
We must surrender to experience if we are to make this Freedom fruitful. It is a sentiment we heard from Meg Worden about her incarceration. We must fully accept this Freedom and heighten our awareness. We must release our preconceptions and cease the relentless march of memories and plans. We must shift our focus from ourselves to our surroundings. The demand now is to love:
“For the mind must be interested or absorbed in something, just as a mirror must always be reflecting something. When it is not trying to be interested in itself-as if a mirror would reflect itself-it must be interested, or absorbed, in other people and things. There is no problem of how to love. We love. We are love, and the only problem is the direction of love, whether it is to go straight out like sunlight, or to try to turn back on itself like a “candle under a bushel. ”
Imagine then what happens when we require students to pass tests. Inspired to focus outward and to love, these students instead learn to focus on themselves—their performance, their grades, their standing. We are lighting the candle and simultaneously smothering it. Our schools are the spark, but also the bushel.
The blank page, the empty day, the uncertain future—they only come to life with love shining outward.
It may be worth considering:
How might you teach students to love?
How might your assessments focus students outward instead of focusing them on themselves?
12. Freedom and Pain
There is something else that demands courage, optimism and a willingness to embrace a different way of being. It is pain. Pain robs us of our pretensions to autonomy. It highlights the limits of our freedom. It reminds us that we are but one expression of a system constantly tending towards equilibrium no matter our plans or pretensions. Wracked by pain, we may feel outrage or resentment at the circumstances, the imposition, the injustice. It reminds us though that we are pawns of nature and culture, and subject to their systemic constraints. Our pretensions to autonomy are crushed. We must change, or continue to suffer.
Now what?
Pain imposes a bitter wisdom. Despite any devotion to rugged individualism that we may harbor, our pain, any pain, is a systemic pain. Pain forces us to expand our powers of perception. Why has this happened? What can we do? What must we change, because if we do not address this pain then we will transmit it onward through the system. We will have transformed ourselves from victim to perpetrator.
We don’t have to endure pain to understand the wisdom. We are just one vibration in this symphony, but no less responsible for the quality of the whole. We are not autonomous. That is the lesson of pain.
It may be worth considering:
For students surely aware of their growing independence, how can you embed an appreciation for the spider web of interdependencies in which they dance? How can you teach systems thinking?
For students focused on self-improvement, how can you expand their perspective to embrace systemic improvement?
13. Freedom and Liberation
We spend our lives working on our plans, seeking that undeniable peak experience: Liberation. We define ourselves by those moments when the constraints come off, when we achieve our goals, when the problem or project that has devilled us for a semester or for years finally yields. We feel both relief and triumph at meeting our goals. We are free!
Zen says not really, though! We achieve one goal, only to march on to the next, and the next, and the next, firmly entrenched in a cycle of achievement. Zen offers instead “satori,” or awakening, “kensho”, or seeing one’s nature and “sunyata”, or emptiness. Tricycle magazine devotes itself to Zen and describes it as a tradition that emphasizes “meditation, non-duality, and non-conceptual understanding” to achieve liberation from “greed, anger, and ignorance” (Tricycle, u.d., para. 3). With meditation, Zen suggests we focus deeply on the present to free ourselves from dwelling on the past and the future. It gets us off the unending cycle of striving and achievement. Despite intimations of the possibility, I cannot speak authoritatively for this experience of liberation. Immersed in nature, in a runner’s high, absorbed by art or music, late in the day on a long bicycle tour, when the engine of the mind stops and all becomes sensation, at those moments, I have imagined this kind of freedom. Perhaps this is “sunyata”.
I take some comfort in this ultimate liberation, in the availability of it, but I am more fulfilled by Self-Determination: the freedom to decide for myself, to set my own course, to choose my own adventures and set my own goals. I want to inspire our students with that possibility—that they too can look forward to charting their own course. To do this, we would have to teach them to be resilient, to make plans and pursue them tenaciously, to inspire and enroll others with their ideas, and to stay hopeful despite the obstacles they might encounter. To do this, we need to help these students truly, deeply believe that anything is possible.
Before we bore students with the details of a discipline they have not yet emotionally signed up for, perhaps we could give them a visceral sense of that moment in their future when the hard work pays off, if only to judge whether it’s worth dedicating their lives or even an afternoon to.
It might be worth considering:
Do you have a deeply personal story from your own life?—Nothing theoretical! It will be an authentic hero’s journey filled with trials and peril, steered by good decisions and truly bad ones, but studded with moments of sublime bliss, and culminating in a flash of ecstasy. Nothing less will do! That story will do more to enroll your students than a textbook could ever hope to achieve. This discipline, these constraints, all this effort, and even these miseries and catastrophes, we will proclaim, they stemmed from decisions I made for myself, and ultimately led to one of the best moments of my life.
And if you don’t have that epiphany to share, then drop what you’re doing, choose something that scares you and intrigues you, and go get a life.
References
Angelou, M. (1983). Caged Bird [Poem]. In Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? Penguin Random House.
Foster, F. & Kristofferson, K. (1969). Me and Bobby McGee [Song]. Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harper and Row.
Fromm, E. (1942). The Fear of Freedom. Routledge and Kegan Paul, Great Britain.
Illich, I. (2013). Deschooling Society. KKIEN. Originally published in 1970.
Purser, R. (2019, June 14). The Mindfulness Conspiracy, The Guardian.
Tricycle.org (u.d.). What do Zen teachers say about enlightenment? Accessed 07/16/21 from https://tricycle.org/beginners/buddhism/what-do-zen-teachers-say-about-enlightenment/
Watts, A., (1951). The Wisdom of Insecurity. Pantheon.
Worden, M. (u.d.). Everything I Know About Freedom, I Learned in Prison, Accessed 7/6/21 from https://mariashriver.com/finding-freedom-prison-meg-worden/.
Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!