Risking Reverence

Abstract

From the first day I stepped into a classroom as a teacher, I knew that any moment spent teaching in ways not relevant to the lives my students and I were living was to dishonor us both in some profound way. Our shared mortality insists on something bigger than the rhetoric that defines school. From controlled power structures to impositions of limits, I have continually found myself puzzling through a system that allows little opportunity for reverence, reflection, revelation, or creation. Because it abhors weakness, public education approaches the most vulnerable in all of us as something to be minimalized rather than named and explored. What is sacred is not the human condition but human capital. Humility, awe, and wonder are in short supply; ironically, so are honor, duty, and respect. Possibility means test scores, and knowledge is associated with mastery rather than discovery.