Maxine Greene.

Now, I do not mean learning to be autonomous, responsive only to one's single self and its desires. I mean a participatory freedom rising from the realization that we are parts of a whole, involved (and, yes, defined) in a range of relationships, extending from the family to the local community, to the society at large. Freedom signifies the capacity to choose and the power to act, neither one of which is a natural endowment; they have to be nurtured, they have to be taught. And they require open spaces with vistas on alternative realities, on what might be, on what should be. For John Dewey, "The possibility of freedom is deeply grounded in our very beings. It is one with our individuality, our being uniquely what we are and not imitators or parasites of others. But, like other possibilities, this possibility has to be actualized," and then, he said, it can be actualized only within and by means of surrounding conditions, by aware engagement with others in the natural and the human world.

To deprive young people of the kinds of openings that might allow them to break with confinement and reach beyond where they are seems to me to be an outrage. It is rationalized by a willed ignorance, or a deliberate distortion of what we know about human development, becoming different, finding our way in the world. It is to deny the significance of eros, of desire, the passion, the energy that moves people to explore, to learn to learn. Most often, such denials are reserved for poor children, ethnic minorities, persons fated by birth to belong at the bottom of whatever hierarchy those in power decide to invent. We grow accustomed to hearing various authorities declare that failure in school or inability to pass tests must be due to children's inattentiveness, lack of motivation, hyperkinetic behavior--something, anything, that makes it the children's fault that they fail or seem unable to memorize, draw inferences, do what normal and well-adjusted, "good" students know how to do. Free as anyone else, such youngsters could only blame themselves. Made to think that way, they find the space of their possibility narrowing; the freedom they are told they possess is turned against them.

Think of the assumed freedom of the unwed mother and the responsibility attached to what she has done--the drear responsibility of the single one, so often abandoned, feeling lost and powerless and, yes, free. That is but a small example of what I have called the ambiguity of freedom, meaning that the idea or the concept or the condition of freedom is susceptible to more than one interpretation. Over the years, the American notion of freedom signified freedom from all kinds of interference or constraint. Self-made men (almost always white men) abounded, free to conquer the wilderness, to build factories, to run banks, to expand steel mills, to bind the nation together with railroads. Many saw themselves as free in a Gatsbyan sense, free for mastery in pursuit of the Grail, be that Grail wealth, power over others, immunity to the "foul dust" in the eastern air.

hat moment in The Great Gatsby when Jay Gatsby (once James Gatz, the son of poor farmers) invents a Platonic image of himself "as a son of God--a phrase which if it means anything means just that--and he must be about his Father's Business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty." Of course, his striving for upward mobility is blocked by others' view of him as hopelessly lower class. There is that vision of freedom as a grandiose dream; but linked to it, haunting those who read, is the reminder of how those in power regard the dreamers and the powerless. "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made." Power, indifference, irresponsibility, carelessness--another face of what is thought of as freedom, freedom linked with claims of entitlement, with a deliberate refusal to see.

Not only does this allow the persistence of social suffering; it is an attitude, a way of being that narrows the space of becoming for those around, for those affected. It was that what strikes me as a fearful violation of others' rights that made me want to attempt this conference. Abruptly I began to see connections between a number of recent violations, intrusions, injustices and more than savage inequalities: Mayor Giuliani's attack on the Brooklyn Museum and his threat to evict it from a city-owned building; the fearful spread of racial profiling (leading to death or torture too many times); what is called "zero tolerance," another way of stigmatizing children in schools; the criminalization of youth, as more and more of them are tried and sentenced as if they were adults.

And then I think of the most recent obsession with assessment, the imposition of tests on little children, the implicit demands that teachers teach to the tests, demands that clearly encroach upon the teachers' freedom to shape their own modes of pedagogy, to make their own creative uses of curriculum. Then there is the renewed emphasis upon standards, uniform standards. Necessary as standards are, important as norms are and ideal possibilities, the notion of uniform standards in an increasingly diverse population erodes the teachers' freedom, as it cuts into the freedom of youngsters from far-off places. Yes, they and their parents want to find out what is expected of them in this country, what it takes to be a success; but in so many respects it is up to them--conscious of alternative possibilities--to choose themselves and the project by means of which they might shape their identities. As Dewey put it (and I must say that Jean-Paul Sartre and Paulo Freire said many of the same things--as do numbers of our feminist colleagues breaking with essentialist ideas, with predefinitions, with patriarchal labels), "The self is not something ready made but something in continuous formation through choice of action."

You see the importance of freedom in that process of continuous formation and in the sense of future possibility. Dewey went on to say that "self and interest are two names for the same fact; the kind and amount of interest actively taken in a thing reveals and measures the quality of selfhood which exists." Again I think of how necessary it is for there to be support in that process of formation, support and deliberate efforts to create situations that can generate interest, enable the young to feel alive, wide awake, not smothered, as Virginia Woolf said, "in the cotton wool of daily life."

I have seen the empty eyes of children who have no interest, no hope, no ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise--one of the definitions of the imagination I like to turn to when I try so hard to find out just how to move the young to some kind of commitment, some way of actualizing themselves by making deliberate efforts to resist, to transform; one of the definitions I turn to when I think of the terrible deficiencies in our society that my colleagues here are about to disclose and discuss--the endemic violence, the pain inflicted on the young, the heightening of racism, the gun as symbol and icon, the misuses of freedom by those who call themselves good Americans or Christians or Promise Keepers, the ones who fight against gun control, often the same ones who, with claims of affirming life, are willing to kill to stop women from choosing abortion.

Most of us realize that if we consciously take some kind of action against what stands in the way of our becoming, our learning, our search for meaning, and we do so in the name of possibility and, if we are lucky, along with others, the spaces of our freedom do enlarge. We might even say that our private spaces somehow or other connect with others'; and, perhaps, in the center of all of them there are potentials for relationships, what Hannah Arendt called "the web of relationship," when people come together as who, not what, they are, come together as situated free people, enabling what Arendt called an "in between" to come into being, opening a vision of a public space.

It may require the activity of a social imagination--a capacity to envisage a transcending of the violence, the unfairness, the alienation, the carelessness we see around us. I would hope, as you all do, I think, that the evils, the deficiencies we talk about will, after a time, be viewed as obstacles to our own becoming, our own becoming different. Indeed, I am hopeful about the work of the social imagination--both with the arts and apart from the arts--in bringing into being the image of what Paulo Freire called "a lovelier world," a vision of a better state of things.

It may be that it is only when we can look at things as if they were otherwise, only when we can create an as/if--a decent world of day-care centers and libraries and wonderful playgrounds as well as computers for everyone and space in which to move and space to enter into dialogues, a space perhaps with murals on the walls, and marigolds blooming (as they refused to bloom in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye) only as we bring an alternative reality into being will we find what exists unendurable.

I wish you a varied day, a day that addresses itself to your indignation and also to your hopes--for a future that is unpredictable but which remains a harbor of the possible.