From James Moffett, Harmonic Learning
One generation of teachers has somehow got to bring through one generations of students who will have
thoughts we have not had before. It is clear that the nation’s and the planet’s problems cannot be solved by
just thinking along the lines we do now according to our heritage.
Societies relying on conventional wisdom are doomed. They need instead some breathtakingly new ideas
that will never come from a cookie-cutter curriculum designed just relay what is known and thought now.
The next generation must have an education creative enough to survive its inheritance. No country still
ransoming its education to nationalistic competition and ethnocentricity will survive. If we don’t enable the
young to transform the culture, we won’t have one to transmit. If we construed public education as personal
liberation, it would hardly mean more than fulfilling the already professed goal of teaching the young to
think for themselves.
Truly free inquiry has conflicted so much with the old goal of transmission and Identity maintenance that
we have sabotaged our own noble aim. This is unnecessary and unwise. If we educate youngsters to
transcend their heritage, they will be able to transform it and lead other cultures to do the same. The
American way is to pioneer. And the practical way is the spiritual way. Pages 30-32
Declaration
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands
which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and
equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions
of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That
to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right
of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such
principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety
and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for
light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to
suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are
accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a
design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such
government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
Preamble
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the
Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United
States of America.
Modern life means democracy. Democracy means freeing intelligence for independent effectivenessthe emancipation of mind as an individual organ to do its own work. We naturally associate
democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of
thought behind it is only chaos J. Dewey
Education: "One of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought."
Bertrand A. Russell
Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the
younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it
becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and
creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. —
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Maxine Greene in Releasing the Imagination
One of the reasons I have come to concentrate on imagination as a means through which we can
assemble a coherent world is that imagination is what, above all, makes empathy possible. It is what
enables us to cross the empty spaces between ourselves and those we teachers have called "other"
over the years. If those others are willing to give us clues, we can look in some manner through
strangers' eyes and hear through their ears. That is because, of all our cognitive capacities,
imagination is the one that permits us to give credence to alternative realities. It allows us to break
with the taken for granted, to set aside familiar distinctions and definitions...
We have also our social imagination: the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might
be in our deficient society, on the streets where we live, in our schools. As I write of social
imagination, I am reminded of Jean-Paul Sartre's declaration that "it is on the day that we can
conceive of a different state of affairs that a new light falls on our troubles and our suffering and that
we decide that these are unbearable." That is, we acknowledge the harshness of situations only when
we have in mind another state of affairs in which things would be better. Similarly, it may only be
when we think of humane and liberating classrooms in which every learner is recognized and
sustained in her or his struggle to learn how to learn that we can percieve the insufficiency of
bureaucratized, uncaring schools. And it may be only then that me are moved to choose to repair or
to renew..
www.maxinegreene.org/