Your call to change has been a powerful and desperately needed challenge to the entrenched interests and assumptions that have dominated this nation for many years.
I, like so many others, have been deeply moved and inspired by your words and plans.
Yet in one area I have felt a disappointing dissonance between your challenge and your proposals. As an educator it seems to me that this is a time like no other when we need to rethink and re-envision how, and for what purpose, we seek to educate the children and youth of this nation.
I will leave aside here my criticisms of the disastrous and deadening No Child Left Behind, and instead urge you to help us re-envision education so that it can truly speak to the lives of human beings in the twenty-first century. In doing this, it may be helpful to reach back to some of those who, at an earlier time, understood that education and democracy were inextricably connected. Civic literacy must be a central concern in the educational goals of our schools. If your concern is a knowledgeable, concerned, and engaged citizenry, then education must be a process that teaches young people to think critically about their lives, their culture, and the broader world in which they live. We need thoughtful and aware human beings who are encouraged to question-and where appropriate challenge the dominant or conventional assumptions about how we live our lives.
Civic literacy is more than a matter of information and knowledge, however. It means teaching our young the importance of social responsibility, deep concern for our nation and our global community, an ethic of caring and compassion, the imperative of social justice to a humane and peaceful world and, not least, a sense of agency and hope. We must teach young people to be "border crossers"-comfortable with human difference and capable of seeing the world from the experience and perspective of others. We need young people who are taught to be courageous and confident in their readiness to hold and express a belief or opinion. And today, civic literacy means teaching the young that they are more than citizens of the United States. They are global citizens who are part of a complex weave of interconnected communities. Poverty, disease, war, and ecological destruction, wherever they occur, are all of our responsibility, and they affect all of our lives. To transform education in this way will, of course, require the serious commitment of your administration to reform around issues of educational leadership and teacher preparation-at least as energetic as the efforts that have been put into the testing and skills focus of these past years.
Conservatives have been right in arguing that education is always a morally infused enterprise. Neither as parents nor as teachers do we offer our children an ethically neutral vision of what ought to be most meaningful or valuable in their lives. Today, our schools are institutions that teach children, above all else, the importance of individual success and competition. It is surely time for them to emphasize something else as the key to a meaningful and fulfilling life. The enormous challenges that we face as a planet demand a different kind of focus for what we do with our lives-one in which community, connection, caring, the ending of violence, and the well-being of every life become central to a purposeful existence. You have spoken powerfully of this when you have challenged us to move beyond greed and self-interest and put the well-being of the community first. With your support and vision, we can begin to educate our young so that what becomes most important to their lives is how they may help to heal and repair our torn and damaged world.
My heartfelt best wishes for all your efforts to create a more just, peaceful, and generous world.
Svi Shapiro teaches in the Education and Cultural Studies program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His most recent book is Losing Heart: The Moral and Spiritual Miseducation of America's Children (Lawrence Erlbaum).
