MASKED THE PLAY

We often speak about children and young people in our society as “the future.” What do we imply by such a belief? Preservation, or change? Ensuring that children and young people can live in the world as it is, or ensuring the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that will enable them to change the world, to construct on their terms new possibilities? How we think about that will say a lot about what we do in our schools, the ideas we explore, the questions we raise, the books we read, the experiences we provide.
To raise such questions is, of course, to imply the need keep large hopes before us, to make use of a language and ideals that inspire us beyond our current practices. To those who worry about large hopes serving as guides (and I meet many who are concerned about this), I offer Alfred North Whitehead’s belief that “when ideals have sunk to the level of practice, the result is stagnation” (Whitehead, [1929] 1959). Carlos Fuentes, Mexican novelist and diplomat, phrased it differently but also powerfully: “We say justice, we say development, we say democracy. Words won’t bring them, but without the words, they will never exist” (Fuentes, 1986, p. 16). Not placing our work within this broader framework, not viewing it as a step toward fuller possibilities is to ensure that what we
will decline in its potency. Because I see this as such an important point, I offer several additional entries—essentially corroboration. Thomas Merton, for example, wrote: “The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little” (in Mad lock, 1989, p. 13). And Anton Chekhov offered, “Man is what he believes” (in Mad lock, 1989,
14), a viewpoint that relates closely to Erich Heller’s often quoted statement: “Be careful how you define the world, it is like that” (Heller, 1959, p. 205). In a similar vein, Italo Calvino, one of the world’s best storytellers, wrote, “Literature remains alive only if
set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares to imagine will literature continue to have a function” (Calvino, 1988, p. i). In this sense, teachers need to be like these poets and writers.

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