You've Got to be Carefully Taught (Education for Liberation)

I spent the last couple of days with my coach colleagues at BetterLesson, and it was so amazing. I work from home most of the time, and I usually see my colleagues in the Boston area on Thursdays. Some of my colleagues work remotely from New Jersey, Montana, North Carolina and Texas, and starting with Coachapalooza at the beginning of the school year, we meet quarterly for our own professional development and time to connect. The time we spend together feels like magic.

At each of our quarterly gatherings we've been leaning into culturally responsive teaching and learning work - defining the work, identifying and unpacking biases, and exploring specific ways to support our teachers with cultural awareness and appreciation, family and community engagement, and with helping students to become socially and politically conscious and to take action against injustice. The work is hard, and the work is great. It helps me to stay all on fire like William Lloyd Garrison talked about.

I've never seen South Pacific, but I've heard of the song You've Got To Be Carefully Taught. The lyrics stayed on my mind the night before the first day of our retreat last week, so I knew I needed to share it with the team as we thought about what learning experiences we'd want to create for ourselves and students if we were still classroom teachers following the tragic, yet not novel, events in Charlottesville. 

You've got to be taught to hate and fear
You've got to be taught from year to year
It's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade
You've got to be carefully taught

You've got to be taught before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught

This is so true! Kids don't naturally hate other kids. You put kids together, and their natural inclination is to play - tag, hide and seek, build sandcastles, jump rope, splash in puddles . . . and they don't become hesitant until someone introduces the idea of separation. And even when society/people try to force kids to separate, some kids connect anyway. The Romeos and Juliets. The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson is a powerful picture book which tells the story of Clover and Annie who become friends in a segregated community.

While kids have to be carefully taught to be fearful of others, the opposite can also be true. Kids can be carefully taught to let go of fear, hatred, prejudice and ignorance. I believe that's where schools and teachers come in. That's a big part of why I do the work I do.

Hatred and ignorance, stereotyping, prejudice, racism and xenophobia are prisons. The prison walls are invisible to some, but they are very real. We are placed in these prisons as children, all of us by the inequities built into American systems and structures from the very beginning, and some of us even more so with the baggage we receive from our families. Some family baggage has us in minimum security prisons, and some of us end up in supermax. As children, we don't have any say in the matter. Genuine relationships with and learning about others across differences (race, culture, gender, socioeconomics, educational experiences, neighborhoods, religions, languages, opportunities for travel, etc.) offer us a kind of parole.

Some of us refuse to be institutionalized, and choose to exit the prison of hatred and ignorance boldly. No recidivism for us. Some exit with curiosity. Some with confusion (when you don't know you've been in darkness, the light can be painful). Some with anger about being put in that prison to begin with. Some choose a halfway house because they're not quite ready to leave all the way. And, unfortunately, some choose to stay in prison, self-imposed life sentences, choosing to live in hate and ignorance, and trying diligently to imprison others. Those who choose to stay imprisoned are loud. Many are in positions of power. Many are all over the internet. They create flyers like this.

My faith tells me that we are all created in the image of God (Imago Dei). My faith tells me that God values diversity by nature of the fact that there's so much of it in this world. My faith tells me that God is love. I believe that love is far stronger than hate. I believe that love wins. Those of us who choose love HAVE to be louder, stronger, bolder, and we must have more stamina. We need to be brave. We need to be willing to be uncomfortable. We need to be willing to hear, do and say hard things. We need to let people know that they are in prison, and we need to offer a loving hand to those who no longer want to be. Jane Elliott offered that hand to the children in her third grade in Iowa after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. If you haven't already, you can see what she did here: A Class Divided, Part I and A Class Divided, Part 2.

Jane Elliott had her path, and we have ours. Find your traveling companions and let's go!