I think of myself as a cockeyed optimist, but that word has been getting some heat lately. Yeah, it’s only a mindset. HOPE is where we must energize our active selves to make the better things we want actually come to pass. That’s nice, and of course it makes sense. Active hoping is as powerful as active learning.
But there’s more, and on the Sunday before Valentine’s Day activists Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood called me to account. Not just me, but all of us of a certain age.
For years I have not infrequently signed off on messages and posts and articles with a cheery reminder to readers that the reason we are in education is to prepare the next generations to be ready to save the world; I’ve said this in so many words, and I’m kind of regretting these words right now.
McKibben and Windwood penned an essay in the New York Times “Week in Review” section titled “Call It ‘Codger Power.’ We’re Older and Fighting for a Better America.” Headed by a photo of a pugnacious Neil Young, the essay introduces a movement called Third Act, a call to action that reminds the olds among us that once we were young, and we took to the streets and used our wits to make good things happen in our society—civil rights, the environmental movement, the end of a long and unpopular war. They might even have added that the young people who changed the world in Berlin and elsewhere in eastern Europe in 1989 are themselves no spring chickens thirty-some years later.
Surveying the bleak political landscape of 2022, McKibben and Windwood rightly note that “at the moment it’s young people who are making most of the difference, from the new civil rights movement exemplified by Black Lives Matter to the teenage ranks of the climate strikers.” Every educator has marveled at the powerful efforts of the Parkland activists (remember those marches back in 2018?), the voices of youth that have rung so clear in the Black Lives Matter conversation, and the ways that Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg have riveted the world’s attention on human rights and the unfolding climate catastrophe.
“But,” the authors write, “we can’t assign tasks this large to high school students as extra homework; that’s neither fair nor practical.” Yikes. That’s just what my sunny little closings have been implying, haven’t they?
Boomers, it’s time to step up. Remember our younger days and recall what was accomplished by the steady pressure of our upraised voices, whether in mass protests (raise your hand if the words Mobilization or Moratorium evoke a memory) or through collective action (was your college campus shut down in the spring of 1970?).
And no, neither I nor the Third Act are suggesting we codgers take this all upon ourselves. As educator codgers and aging Xers (and Millennials and Yers, too), we have a collective responsibility to act on parallel and complementary fronts. We must do the right thing for ourselves and demand the right thing from the institutions for which we work. We must make sure that our schools are not in retreat in their policies, practices, or programs.
If we stay the course, if we remind ourselves that the arc of history bends toward justice only when good people are exerting all the force they can on its path, we can make the world and its future better. And along the way, by setting an example of moral courage and intentional action, we can model for our students the power of critical analysis and critical thinking to ignite advocacy and activism that makes a difference.
It’s not on the kids. It’s on us. We need their voices and energy (student trusteeship is a way to accomplish this, just by the way) but they need our example and our partnership even more. We need to draw on our own experiences and memories to demonstrate for and engage our students in seeing how people can come together in causes that matter.
We can teach that “Hope is a thing with feathers” (thank you, as always, Emily Dickinson), but it must have flesh and bones and a beating heart to take wing and achieve dreams.