#dan walden

"For Freire and for anyone who teaches great books, what is shared, our humanity, is the most important part of education. And in Freire’s account, it is precisely what structures of oppression seek to cancel out: “The solution of this contradiction between oppressor and oppressed is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.” It is not enough to recognize this fact theoretically: we reclaim our humanity by laboring, by doing what is proper to rational and social creatures, and what is most proper to us—what is most uniquely our own—is the depth of cognition made possible by language and the extended social life to which language gives birth. We are most human when we are thinking together, and only by doing this and habituating ourselves toward doing it can we change the circumstances that deprive us of this shared humanity."

"One teaches because one has fallen in love and, like any lover, one wants to shout it from the rooftops, because in loving something we come to see that it is good, that it is something a person should want for themselves. We on the left generally agree that education is for the student’s benefit, not for the benefit of their future employer, and that students go to school not merely to acquire skills but to develop an entire social and intellectual life: to have something good and to have it forever. We are sometimes embarrassed to say this, I think, out of misplaced or excessive courtesy: we have seen too many snobs tell people what they ought to like. But we shouldn’t be. It is not snobbish to say that a person with lungs must breathe or that a person with a stomach must eat, nor that a person with a mind must think. It is not snobbish to show someone how to love something new—it is a gift."