As a culture, we’ve forgotten that middle classes are not naturally occurring. They have to be created, consciously.
For young people coming into adulthood now, higher education has never been more necessary or more expensive. That’s a cruel dilemma, and it speaks to polarization. If you don’t win, you very much lose. It wasn’t always that way, and it doesn’t have to be.
The great gift of education is in showing that the present doesn’t have to be.
Matt Reed, (@deandad) Friday Fragments
These few sentences convey so clearly and succinctly what I have been saying in conversation with friends, family and anyone else who will listen, what I find so troubling about the future for our young people.
And yet, Matt Reed holds out hope and insists that we can change things.
Listen to bell hooks describe poverty in our current society (in an interview with George Yancy):
G.Y.: How is the poverty of today different?
b.h.: Let’s face it, one of the things white people gave us when they gave us integration was full access to the tormenting reality of desire, and the expectation of constant consumption. So part of the difference of poverty today is this sort of world of fantasy — fantasizing that you’ll win the lottery, fantasizing that money will come. I always cling to Lorraine Hansberry’s mama saying in “A in Raisin in the Sun,” “Since when did money become life?” I think that with the poverty of my growing up that I lived with and among, we were always made to feel like money is not what life is all about. That’s the total difference for everyone living right now, because most people in our culture believe money is everything. That is the big tie, the connecting tie to black, white, Hispanic, native people, Asian people — the greed and the materialism that we all invest in and share.
This assessment resonates with me profoundly. We all have cause for concern. Yet bell hooks is also hopeful and a believer in the power of love:
b.h.: Well, I believe whole-heartedly that the only way out of domination is love, and the only way into really being able to connect with others, and to know how to be, is to be participating in every aspect of your life as a sacrament of love, and that includes teaching. I don’t do a lot of teaching these days. I am semi-retired. Because, like any act of love, it takes a lot of your energy.
Teaching as an act of love. Education as a vehicle for change. These ideas are not ‘out there’, they can and should become more ‘in here’: in our systems, organizations, in our schools, in our approaches. But the truth is, those changes won’t happen until we, one by one; each one, teaching one decide to do it differently on as many levels as possible.
I was struck reading both of these pieces. And I felt too tired to write. Yet the need to make the connection (just one of so, so many) would not let me rest. The bell hooks interview is everything and I will be rereading it quite a few more times I suspect. Matt Reed’s hopefulness is a position I want to support and rally behind. There is so much at stake and every day we have choices.
Please read the full post and interview of these writers. Both offer wise and ultimately affirming messages of how we can and ought to move forward.
edifiedlistener 