I’m glad you found something useful here. Best wishes in your efforts.

I’m trying to find a how-not. I knew when I began this work, long ago, that cynicism was a likely outcome. I was naive to think that I could avoid it. It’s time for a new why. The caring part is, as you point out, the key to redemptive grace.

And summer vacation is almost here. That never fails.

Just like the ICS, the schools do a lot of good. They may not abolish sati, but most kids do learn to read, write, an’ cipher. And schools have a stronger moral mandate then the raj did; it’s less than clear (to say the least) that the Subcontinent needed to be colonized, but kids really do need someone to instruct and protect them. Many educational policy-makers in the US, like the bureaucrats of the imperial Foreign Office, truly have the best of intentions.

But, as you’ve so powerfully noted, Doug, the colonial mind-set is a recipe for control, not true education. We must resist it.

Occasionally ICS agents would “go native,” a la Condrad’s Kurtz. Instead of carving out little empires for themselves, though, they would come to identify so much with their “charges” that they would actively fight their own government when it tried to break a treaty or otherwise harm them. When we follow your Four Part Plan, or something like it, we begin to “go native” for our kids. We stop caring that The Children Are Our Future, and start caring about our students’ own futures. Love is the cornerstone of an anti-imperialist pedagogy: loving kids as ends in themselves, not just the means to one.

I’m reminded of one of my favorite passages from William James, where he argues for the necessity of educational observation made “without brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual, by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.”

A recent Wilson Quarterly article uses a term it credits to one Harvard sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin: “ ‘quantophrenia,’ a psychological compulsion to grasp for the numeric.” It would seem that much of the educational superstructure of our nation is indeed afflicted with this malady.

I wonder why so many committed teachers are attracted, as we both are, to phenomenological, “third force” understandings of our practice? And why administrators and politicians have seemed to consistently embrace number-fetishizing, “quantophrenial,” approaches? And, importantly, is there a media via, a middle way?

I agree that we as teachers have been, in a sense, colonized. I doubly agree that we are artists, not scientists. The tools of the expert teacher are creativity, playfulness, empathy, wisdom, and, above all, love. These tools have nothing to do with latest quasi-scientific fashions—they are our birthright as humans. Their perfection is, as you so profoundly noted, a lifelong, “spiritual path.” A Liberation Theology of education must not just reject the dominant discourse—it must treasure and nurture these qualities, these Chomskian “deep structures” of real teaching.

Again, thanks for your always thoughtful and thought-provoking ideas.