It is in our nature to create dichotomies, particularly in the grayest of the gray. How do you debate en masse, in the absence of either or?
And so we ask— for example, at Harper High School in the South Side Chicago, where 29 current and former students were shot in a single year— we ask, disdainfully, How do we Learn when we can’t Breathe? On the question of need— at a beautiful school with 16 security guards 4 social workers, and more than 15 surrounding gangs— we refer back to Maslow.
I went once, to a high school full of “at risk” students and discussed dropout rates— as high as 80 percent in some parts. We gave them cards and figures, and asked them to contemplate futures, for example, as a janitor or an NBA basketball star! Questions so self-righteous in their ignorance my cheeks burned, asked to faces six generations descended from slavery & six decades from Brown vs. Board. Are we not awed by the logic in their response to a system with little historical or contemporary evidence of their success?
We are sustained more by the business of answering, than asking the right questions.
So maybe the question of basic needs versus pedagogy was always a false dichotomy. Maybe, in fact, general revenue funding & destandardization of curricula, universal prenatal care & a rebirth of the arts, do not exist in hierarchy.
Do we dare ask the question, to everyone, “What would you do to make your heart sing, if you knew you could not fail, if you knew you could not disappoint?”