More on the March

With less than a week until the Save Our Schools March I'm excited by how much I'm seeing about it on twitter and in my reader. The energy around it is wonderful and exhilarating. It will be absurdly hot next Saturday but I hope folks will turn out, at least for a bit, to show how important this issue is to so many of us.

Deborah Meier, one of my intellectual heroes, will be there. She has been fighting this fight for decades now both in schools and in the public sphere.

In a recent blog post (on her own blog, not Bridging Differences), she writes about the political and financial situation in our country now. She seems to have had hopes, at one point, that she and Tea Partiers might have been able to see eye to eye on some, few things.

But even when the overlap is there, it’s true ONLY about the immediate future of schooling in America. Have to remind myself that schooling is only one part of the jigsaw puzzle—and I got into it sort of by accident and the fight going on today involves all the other agendas that matter to me. Poverty, after all, is best alleviated with money, jobs, power.

She goes on to write quite a bit about the challenges we are facing because of an 'ideological divide' between the few at the top and the rest of us. At the end she voices concern about what our schools and our society are becoming, how much we are expecting students and fellow citizens to comply in many ways.

We need to counter this trend every place we can; we need to praise ornery, feisty resistance—which will sometimes be wrongheaded. We need to arouse anger when its alternative is passivity and withdrawal. We need to look for hope, for alternative paradigms, and for allies—even when it seems utopian to do so.

She gives me hope. If you haven't yet, go and read her words. And, if you can, join us in Washington, D.C. on Saturday!