Demand the Impossible! The World as if It Could Be Otherwise

• In Event: Dreaming in Greene: Reframing Contemporary Educational Policy, Practice, and Research Through Maxine Greene’s Critical Lens

Abstract

Maxine Greene was a singular figure in education—unique in her insights, her impact, her reach, her grasp, and her authority. She consistently raised our imaginative horizons and unleashed our radical visions as she insisted that we see the world as if it could be otherwise. She reminded us—in music words—that ours was the calling of callings, the vocation of vocations, for she believed that teachers who choose to stand on the side of the young can awaken their dreams and invite them to discover and deploy their boundless agency. For generations of teachers and students, Maxine Greene remains uniquely the poet laureate of teaching.
“Consciousness doesn’t come automatically, it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious,” she wrote. Yes, she was not only an engaged scholar, she just as often an enraged scholar. She argued that to prod ourselves to wide- awakeness was an invitation to see the beauty and the ecstasy in all directions, but also the suffering and the unnecessary pain human beings visit upon one another. The vast expanse of her project embraced the aesthetic as well as the social, revolutionary politics as well as an engagement with the arts, a radical openness to angles never before seen and voyages not yet taken.
Education at the end of empire is education in crisis and contestation. The agenda of the powerful is increasingly apparent: privatization, a functional school-to-prison pipeline, drastically lowered expectations for students and families, the demonization of teachers, zero-tolerance as a cat’s paw for surveillance and control, a sort-and-punish curriculum, a culture of obedience and conformity, a narrowing definition of learning as job-training and education as a product to be bought and sold in the marketplace. On the other side there is a growing fight-back based on the principle that all human beings are of incalculable value and that life in a just and free society must be geared toward and powered by a profoundly radical idea: the fullest development of all human beings is the necessary condition for the full development of each person; and, conversely, the fullest development of each is the condition for the full development of all.
In these dark and troubling times we’re in urgent need of a fresh and improved three “r’s”—reimagine, resist, rebuild—a project to reimagine schooling from top to bottom, challenging the politics and policies that dominate so much of the educational debates, and leaning toward a possible world, a world that could be but is not yet.

Author

• William C. Ayers, University of Illinois at Chicago