@edutooters #edutooters
It's the first day of the term and we are going to be discussing Baldwin's A Talk to Teachers.
I reread it every couple of years, and this year, it continues to strike me how a paper written 60 years ago remains so relevant right from the start..."we are living through a very dangerous time." We could change a few words and it could pass for a paper recently written. It's a real indictment of how much farther we have to go educationally.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/baldwin-talk-to-teachers
continues...
"To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society. If a society succeeds in this, that society is about to perish."
I appreciate his point to and calling out white liberals, it hits home :)
Thanks for sharing this powerful piece by Baldwin. I had never read it before. This opening portion is where I'm at:
"The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not...."
@ZingerLearns @edutooters