James Madison High School from which I graduated in 1965 has been featured in the news lately. As of January, three of its graduates all from different parties will be sitting members of the US senate: Chuck Schumer (NY), Norman Coleman (MN), Bernie Sanders (VT). Ruth Bader Ginsburg and several Nobel Prize Winners also graduated from our school. Overcrowded and even shabby, Madison has always been an excellent high school for ordinary kids from not-so-priveleged families. Over the main entrance is an archway (above) into which were carved the words "Education is the true foundation of Civil Liberty"-- James Madison.
I fervently hope that teaching people to use their minds creates an atmosphere of freedom. In just two months I will leave behind students and friends who do not enjoy the blessings of liberty. In class, I try very hard to encourage divergent thinking-- looking at things in new ways, thinking "outside the box" so to speak. For those raised in the disciplined but authoritarian Chinese system, it is difficult to examine problems in new ways.
Madison was a large, competitive and frequently impersonal place.In my time, there were 5,000 students crammed into that 5 story Brooklyn building. It must have been a tough place to teach. I wonder if our teachers suspected how successful many of their students would be. As I work here, I think of them, and I remember this poem which I learned in an English class many years ago.
| Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors WHAT they undertook to do -- WB Yeats
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1 comment:
Roz, I consider my teachers to be so very important to me. I feel I owe them my ability to think critically. I have always been opinionated like my dad but in college my professors started this process and my professors in seminary made it bloom. I was encouraged to disagree in seminary and sift through things that our teachers were telling us. My ETSU professors are not at all prepared for someone like me--a person who says in class that I do not understand what they are saying because my experience is different and then I hope to have a conversation about this--it made me famous (in a bad way) in their faculty meetings as you know.
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