Palling Around

If I wasn't on an FBI list before...
(See? Even when I'm not writing about spies, I'm writing about spies.)

The point is, once upon a time in high school I read this book called A Hope in the Unseen. Perhaps you've read it. It's been on my mind a lot this year, for obvious reasons, but most recently because there was a college friend of the main character whose parents were former members of the Weather Underground. I had never heard of the Weather Underground; my mother had to explain it to me. Now, I didn't think much about this character or his parents until the notification for this week's seminar got sent out and I learned that the Fellows would be hearing from Bill Ayers. The penny dropped. The college friend in A Hope in the Unseen? His kid.

Princeton has been responsible for the tightening of so many of my degrees of separation. (But, I have to say, I'd come as close to Obama as I will likely ever get before I palled around on Wednesday morning. Iowa City is a magical place.)

Ayers was with us to talk about education, and he did so in terms that I've come to understand over my three months in Chicago: 90 minutes more, charter, magnet, CPS, private, south side, west side, north side, New Trier, Head Start, tenure, unions... He held, obviously, very strong viewpoints. I found myself blindly agreeing with 60% of what he said, only to be brought up short by the man himself. We should question everything, and that's what's missing from under-performing schools: curiosity and dialogue. The status quo, even when it's serving you well, should be constantly reexamined. The opinions you agree with are the ones you should scrutinize the most.

Milk, he announced, was his favorite movie of the decade. Also everyone should go see J. Edgar.

I didn't scrutinize those opinions too closely.

One of my fellow Fellows brought up the idea of returning to history for good ideas in education. The example he used was Jane Addams' Hull House: working where you learned and/or lived. Ayers got very excited, and suggested that the best thing our generation could do was look forward and back simultaneously. This was obviously my favorite notion to come out of the morning: the unfortunately not universally obvious idea that progressiveness does not have to divorce itself from the past. And that, furthermore, it shouldn't. It's one thing to say "history repeats itself" and to attempt to avoid the mistakes made by our forebears, but it's another to actively reach back and salvage good ideas that, for one reason or another, never really took hold.