Artifact 5: Reflection

As my final artifact-reflection pair taken from the capstone course “Theories of Change in Educational Institutions,” it seemed only fitting to look back on the transcript of James Baldwin’s “Talk to Teachers,” which was originally delivered as a speech in 1963 and remains a cornerstone of social-justice centered educational thought and theory. In the speech, Baldwin asserts that all “responsible” citizens “— and particularly those [of you] who deal with the minds and hearts of young people,” must be ready to take on the thankless, seemingly impossible and disheartening task of continually attempting to resist and undermine the perpetuation of racism and bigotry within the education system; in order to do this, teachers must be ready and willing to show their students how to radically recognize the reality of their worlds, how to challenge it, and how to cultivate an active, deliberate, and upright conscious in spite of the constant societal pressures pushing for the perpetuation of nefarious norms.

While the principles at the core of the speech are beliefs which undergird the pedagogy, practice, and theory of the Education Department at Bryn Mawr, Baldwin’s words have proven themselves able to sit in my soul and occupy my thoughts in far more significant a manner than other readings or discussions. In particular, the passage “… I would try to make him know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger – and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of any given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything,” continually returns to me and forces me to wonder about teaching with an eye forever turned toward truth, though that task is daunting and often impeded by the threat of those who would rather maintain the status quo than to liberate.

This reading also helps demonstrate the way in which my overall view on the purpose of education has evolved. While I still believe in education’s ability to liberate, Baldwin’s talk helps me to remember that dismantling the oppressive forces engrained in the fabric of the educational system is a significantly more laborious process than I originally believed. He highlights that doing this kind of work is, in fact, so difficult, that every day will be filled with resistance and heartbreak; the true work of education is continuing to aim to form students as deeply thoughtful individuals who question the apparent “truths” around them, despite the continual, external pressure felt while doing so. This talk helps to remind me that the purpose of education is significantly more radical than I originally thought it to be. Rather than aiming to meet current measures of equality, systems of oppression must be dismantled entirely so that a new, more egalitarian institution of equality and liberation can replace the former system, which, being based in an institution of hatred and bigotry, never could have allowed for true equality and liberation.