We Want You to be Heroes

Below is the text of a talk I gave at last Thursday's closing celebration for the Crimson Summer Academy. I was the faculty speaker for the event, held in the majestic Sanders Theater at Harvard University. I post the talk here because it gave me a chance to reflect on my most profound goals for my own involvement in urban education.

I've sometimes felt ambivalent about my worth with educating poor youth. Is my goal simply to allow them to access middle class America? In some ways, yes. At its best, public education has been a means to class mobility in this society and it should be. All young people should have a wide array of options for their future, and those options should include jobs and lifestyles we associate with the middle class and above. If that's the outcome of my work with students, then fine.

In the end, though, I want to teach and lead so that my students don't just have options, but have the inclination to use those options in certain ways. One of the very simple prayers that I pray for my own children virtually every day is that as they grow up, they'll feel they have something significant to give the world. I think that's a part of healthy development, to know that you have something to make the world a better place and to have the power and inclination to do that. Shouldn't education help enable this reality?

Here's the talk. Dave Schmelzer is the friend who shared the insight about heroic journeys, one he also writes about in his fun spiritual memoir, Not the Religious Type.

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Greetings, scholars, family and friends, faculty and staff, all of those in the Harvard community, distinguished guests. What a pleasure it is to be here, tonight – to bear witness to such talent and style. What a pleasure it’s been to teach writing at CSA these past three years – to bear witness to such beauty, such giftedness, such drive. No, I’m not talking about Maxine again, but this whole community, and specifically, you scholars. When people ask me what I do with my summers, I ask them how much time they have to listen because I just can’t stop talking about the marvelous people in this community. So thank you all, for including me as a fellow scholar, a fellow citizen.

In writing class, we improve our craft, of course, but as we do so, we explore. We explore what we see – finding images to capture the beauty of a photograph, or giving expression to the irony found in a painting. We explore what we read – analyzing characters and influences upon authors and discovering what old writers say to us today. And we explore ourselves: our identities, our communities, all the tributaries that have flowed into the rivers that are our lives. We explore.

So, in the spirit of exploration, I’d like to explore you for just a minute, if you’d permit me, to explore our goals for you as scholars and citizens, to explore with all of those who are gathered here and who stand behind you in pushing and supporting you to the successes that lie before you, ready for you to walk into them.

When we see you, we do indeed see scholars.

We see teenagers that can, given a week, tackle early understandings of evolutionary psychology and argue for their connection to the work of a Victorian novelist, in a week. We work with fifteen-year-olds that, given a day, can write sentences like, “Lights emanate from the boat, faintly, but visible in the night sky.” Or there's this one: “The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller, was subject to slander and calumnious accusations in the 1950’s.” Calumnious: it is a word, I looked it up, but certainly not one that I used as a teenager.

You are no lights emanating faintly, but bright stars blazing your path through our doors.

Now not all of you write like that, but you’re more than just writers. You are mathematicians, actors, scientists, filmmakers, readers, dancers, debaters, scholars. And in the months and years to come, we want you to explore all that that means. Go back to your high schools in Cambridge and Boston, go back, and thrive, show those schools your best, and then leave us, go to Smith, go to Tufts, go to Syracuse, go to Bowdoin, go to Columbia, go to Regis, come back to Harvard. Go to your college, whichever one it is, and thrive. Shine, and be the best scholars you can be.

You have our support and our blessing. And by that, I mean not just those of at CSA, much as we adore you, but even more, from those behind you, those supporters of your that are here tonight and those who aren’t here tonight as well because they work, because they speak a different language, because they are otherwise detained.

Family and friends that are here tonight, these remarkable young people so need our support and encouragement, don’t they? Our patience when they yell at us just because they’re stressed about their next test? Our flexibility when their commitments seem tiresome? Our love and affirmation when they seem weary? Scholars, we want so much for you, but you have our support.

We want you to be scholars. But that’s not enough. As much as an achievement as it would be, our dreams for you are more than that you should be educated, wealthier, and secure. Your best dreams for yourselves are more than that as well, I’d suggest.

We want you to be more than scholars, we want you to be heroes.

Scholars of literature, of stories, see in so many of the best of our stories, a heroic journey that I invite you to tonight. The heroic journey starts off with a reluctant hero, one who live sin what seems like a small, ordinary world. But quickly, this small person is thrust out by a herald into some sort of cosmic battle of enormous stakes. Our herald says, “Oh, you hero, the world is wide and the stakes are large. Go and save!”

The hero then goes out on his quests, launches on her journey, and struggles immensely, meeting trials beyond their wildest dreams, until these trials often even come to a point of some enormous loss or death. But then, at their lowest point, our heroes triumph against great odds and find power and tools to come back home and better their environment, saving the world in some sense.

You see this story played out in one form or another in tales and myths all around the world. A friend of mine suggests that we see that because these stories a template of the very best that we could imagine our lives becoming, the heroic journey waiting for each of us who will step out of our small worlds and embrace the invitation.

You, scholars, have, of course already stepped out of your small worlds of East Cambridge, Dorchester, South Boston, Roxbury, Chinatown, Inman Square and all the other places you call home. You’ve stepped across the river, or across the street as it may be, but for many of you, this journey to Harvard has been a crossing of what seems like an ocean of differences. But it’s just the start of your journey.

The Crimson Summer Academy, with me as its voice tonight I suppose, stands a herald, calling you to go farther, and to accept a calling to be the heroes that save our world.

Now some of you are thinking, “Heroes? You’re kidding! This man’s been watching too much Batman the Dark Knight lately or hanging out with his little boys and their Superman Underoos. We’re not perfect, we’re not super-powered. We may be scholars, but we’re no heroes.”

And there you’re wrong. Because there are no perfect heroes. Sophomore scholars and I have crossed the path of a number of individuals who Americans consider great heroes: John F. Kennedy, Jr.: perhaps heroic in his charismatic leadership of a nation through trying times. Henry David Thoreau: perhaps heroic in his influence on so many people, so many young people to resist that which is unjust and to live simply and live well. Even John Proctor of old Salem: heroic in his principled unwillingness to join the witch hunt of his age, and heroic in his conviction to hold onto his honor and his name.

And yet we encountered these men too, didn’t we, as a president slow to action for justice and regularly making enormous blunders, as a hermit who spent two years in the woods and a night in jail and little else it would seem, as a philanderer, a self-protective man who cheated on his wife and first cowered before the authorities, afraid to tell the truth.

Flawed heroes – those with blind spots, character deficits, outright foolishness at times, are the only kind we have, but we need more of them.

We need you to, scholars, to be citizens, to be members of our world who make it better. We need you to lead criminally decrepit schools down paths of renewal. We need you to advance new treatments for the diseases the kill our friends and relatives. We need you to govern nations that don’t think through their actions and war foolishly, killing thousands. We need you to change the landscape of our cities, where is poverty or crime or just despair. We need you to stay at your colleges you attend and help them found more programs like Crimson Summer Academy, so we can send yet more heroes off into the world. We need you to not just emanate faintly with your gifts and beauty but to burn like torches in our shadowed world.

And you need this, for yourself. To be full is not just to be a scholar – to develop your mind and achieve a career and a paycheck and their benefits. To be full is also to be a hero, to play your part in making one spot of our earth more just, more beautiful, more fruitful.

As a father, I want to see my children outstrip me in my joy and my achievements. Friends, family, gathered guests, we want this for these scholars, don’t we, to see them surpass what we have been able to do?

Scholars, as you write the pages of your own life, be scholars indeed, but aspire to even greater heights. Be heroes!
Congratulations on your summer, scholars. You’ve been absolutely marvelous. And may you feel encouragement and power tonight as you march on toward your heroic journey!

How Far We've Come?

Reading Deborah Meier's article "Retaining the Teacher's Perspective in the Principalship," I was first struck by how far schools have come since her day. She published the article in 1985 and looked back for the most part at school working conditions in the '60s and '70s. Though Meier's descriptions of the urban elementary schools she first worked in are evenhanded, the conditions still seem horrible. The schools she worked in seem petty, sexist, and boring. Teachers didn't necessarily know what they would teach before the first day of school, which undermines any efforts to make instruction well-planned, thoughtful, and innovating. Predominantly female teaching staffs were treated like children by their largely male principals and these same teachers, at least from Meier's viewpoint, sometimes acted with the maturity with which they were treated. Some teachers no doubt maintained tremendous vitality in this profession, largely out of a deep and authentic love for children and their learning. More teachers would deal with the frustration and humiliation of their positions through less positive outlets. Some "isolated themselves from the rest of the school," others "treated teaching as a stepping stone to more prestigious activities," others took their frustration out on their students, and still more "had learned to distance themselves from the whole experience." And, "of course, many quit." (Meier, 306)

All of this is tremendously sad. And much of it, at least from my experience in pilot schools in Boston, seems dated. Schools seem more equitable than before - at least when it comes to the roles men and women feel, and teachers' unions have made significant strides in professionalizing the work, so that there are saner working conditions that allow for care and preparation to be part of teaching.

Yet in other ways, the article feels just as current as when it was published. Meier writes that "schools should be interesting places for every one of us - children, teachers, and even principals." I'd argue that for many in all three camps, that just isn't true. Children still spend enormous amounts of time filling in worksheets and either completing or avoiding other tasks that add little value to their thinking and serve to quell more than stoke the fire of their curiosity. By the time I meet students in high school, they expect by habit to be disinterested in whatever material or work I bring their way. That, added to the demeaning physical and social conditions they often face in school, makes it no surprise that we have to urge so many so strongly just to stay on the ship until port.

And while some conditions for teachers are certainly better, others may not be. The so-called "teacher-proof curriculum" that Meier so presciently refers to has of course exploded since the writing of her article. I'm not sure that having schools be "personally or intellectually stimulating" for teachers is of the highest value for most leaders. It's still true that many teachers who don't quit survive their jobs through complaining to and about students, deadening their own hopes and dreams, or isolating themselves and their classroom in the hopes that it will be different from "the system."

Ironically, what is so appealing about the school culture Meier describes at the school she herself founded is the opposite of those three. Teachers were encouraged to use their intellect creatively and vigorously in shaping interesting curriculum and instruction. All parties involved had to work together for the common good, necessitating positive engagement and problem solving over complaint. Finally, and most personally appealing to me, teachers collaborated. They met together, planned together, and agreed on the common boundaries that they would live within. Shoot, they even "(shared) the cost of baby-sitting so that all staff could attend weekend retreats or after-school meetings." As a parent of three, that phrase strikes a deep chord, and one that's way outside of my experience working in public schools.

That sense of shared mission, one that isn't just generated by the principal and passed on to the teachers, but is developed by them together with the principal's leadership, seems critical to generating this type of professional community. Only when we all really own the purposes of our work will we want to make sacrifices to achieve them together. And only when we all feel a sense of hopefulness about our outcomes and freedom in unleashing our gifts toward their accomplishment will we find in the journey joy and fun: two pleasures that sustain many worthy human endeavors.