Teaching
Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom.
William Ayers. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press, 2005. Pp. 168. $14.00, paper. ISBN: 0-8070-3269-7. TEL: 617-742-2110
• FAX: 617-723-3097
This
book is an antidote to the various, canned ethical instruction programs that
have been foisted off on schools over the course of recent years. Ayers, who
is the founder of the Small Schools Workshop and the Center for Youth and
Society, observes that “At the base of teaching, at its most fundamental,
profound, and primitive core, all teaching is indeed ethical work. Teachers,
whether they know it or not, are moral actors, and teaching always demands
moral commitment and ethical action.”
In this book he draws on a number of examples from literature, history, and
film for the purpose of depicting the school classroom as a natural site of
ethical action, or, as he calls it, the practice of freedom.
And yet, he warns, there exists a tension between teaching for humanization
and the possibility of dehumanization, wherein authoritarian education takes
the place of free learning in the classroom. The latter, Ayers observes, can
be seen in movies like Rabbit Proof Fence and The Magdalene Sisters, both
of which show educators treating students as empty vessels devoid of ideas,
choice, or humanness.
These movies, he says, show the ways in which education is always for something
and against something else: “Education either stands for human freedom
and liberation, for enlightenment, or it stands for subjugation in one of
its seemingly endless forms.” It is therefore necessary for teachers
to take it upon themselves to choose the former, to stand for truth and freedom
and against oppression, lest they become tyrants disguised as teachers.
In a classroom which is committed to freedom, Ayers insists, educators must
first and foremost completely devote themselves to their students, with all
of their imperfections and contradictions. By acknowledging that students
are individuals of value and consequence, teachers can come to learn as much
about themselves as they learn about their students. This exchange—student
as teacher, teacher as student—Ayers believes, is essential in order
to achieve the development of community and moral engagement in schools and
in a free society.
As an extension of respect for students’ humanity, Ayers writes, teachers
must work to create a classroom where all opinions can be heard and where
all opinions are equally valued. He calls this a “republic of many voices.”
Like the Freedom Schools of the 1960s, Ayers notes, this type of environment
challenges and nurtures students’ growth by exposing students to new
ideas through different methods of learning, as well as by linking what goes
on in the classroom to the lives of the students and to the outside world.
Ayers also draws for examples from the novels of Jose Saramango—including
his works The Cave and The Stone Raft—to demonstrate the importance
of teaching in context, of providing students with knowledge of the world
as it exists and also of how it could be. The characters in these novels break
from the pack to explore worlds unknown, to engage in choices and acts of
both individual will and collective action.
Teachers dedicated to freedom, Ayers asserts, encourage such activism in their
students, pushing them to question the status quo and to take a stance in
the world. This kind of activism, as America saw it during the Civil Rights
movement, Ayers explains, is one in which individuals perform acts of transformation,
actions that make a difference.
“Working in schools,” Ayers says, “where the fundamental
truths and demands and possibilities of teaching at its best are obscured
and diminished and opaque, and where the powerful ethical core of our efforts
is systematically defaced and erased, requires a reengagement with the larger
purposes of teaching.”
In an era in which test scores are paramount, this book is something of an
anachronism. Ayers longs for teachers like Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackery
in To Sir, with Love and Robin Williams’s John Keating in Dead Poets
Society: teachers who see the subjects they teach not as ends in themselves,
but vehicles to make their students more fully human.
Certainly, we cannot simply ignore or dismiss test scores. On the other hand,
people like William Ayers and John Dewey can help, as we used to say in the
1960s, keep our heads screwed on straight.
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