"Freedom is susceptible to more than one interpretation."

Seldom, however, has the commitment to freedom, supposedly central to the American credo, been challenged on so many sides. The origins of this conference are, indeed, to be found in an abrupt recognition of some troublesome connections among recent events and practices in our culture, such as the censorious attack on the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum, the controversy over the right to buy guns, the habits of "racial profiling," the demands for what has been called "zero tolerance," the lessening of teachers' freedom to choose what happens in the classroom, and the ever-increasing criminalization of children.

In my book The Dialectic of Freedom, I talk about freedom as the capacity to choose and the power to act to attain one's purposes. I am interested in opening spaces as well as perspectives. I turn to Dewey, Sartre and Freire and speak of reaching beyond the deficiencies in our worlds, moving (in our effort to repair) toward "a field of possibles." We are not born free, many of us agree; we have to achieve our freedom with the help of those around, opening private and public spaces in which we can become, in which we can choose.

This conference, we hope, will leave us with questions. How can we move away from the notion of freedom from to a concept of freedom for? Is the triumph of the "free market" the same as the triumph of freedom? What is the connection between the upsurge of violence in this country, the many violations of children's and minority rights, the persistence of racism, the attempts at censorship and the preoccupation with testing and standardization? What does all this signify for our schools? How can we ensure that imagination will always, always be free to light the slow fuse of the possible?