Guest Column: Teaching For Change From: University Currents Date: February 4, 2000 By: Patricia Hill Collins, head, African American Studies In the early 1970s, I was assigned to teach a curriculum unit entitled "The Community" to a class of African-American second graders. The community in my students' textbook consisted of single-family homes nestled in plush green grass, populated by all sorts of friendly White people they had never met and probably would never meet. Phrases like "Let's visit our men at the firehouse," "Cross only at the corner," and "The policeman is your friend" peppered the text, all designed to reassure my second-graders that children were loved, cared for and safe in their communities. My students lived in quite a different community. Most resided in a nearby racially segregated public housing project. Their neighborhood experienced all of the social problems that typically accompany poverty and political powerlessness. As I read to them from the pages of their text and saw their blank, bored, and occasionally angry expressions, I realized that I was lying to them. Worse yet, we all knew that the book and I were lying. So I asked them to tell me about their community as they experienced it. Once little boy tentatively raised his hand. To my shock, he shared a story of how, because the housing commission had left the doors open, his best friend had fallen down an elevator chute the day before. His friend had been killed. At that moment, I faced an important choice. I could teach the status quo or I could teach for a change. I did not see how I could lie to my students, no matter how pure my intentions to prepare them for an imagined third-grade entrance test on community vocabulary. So we closed those texts full of smiling, affluent White people and began to talk. At first, my class could not quite believe that I wanted to hear from them. Despite their young age, so many had been silenced by classroom practices that rewarded their obedience and punished their curiosity that they were justifiably afraid to question the publication transcript known as their curriculum. They kept their own oppositional knowledge hidden, relegating it to discussions on the playgrounds, on the streets, and in the privacy of their apartments. But because they were still young, they were able to come to voice much easier than those of us who have endured years of such silencing. With minimal prompting, they shared their feelings about the horror of their friend s death, especially their sense of vulnerability that something similar might happen to them. In some cases, they exploded, sharing deep-seated anger. Through dialogue, these children began to develop the voice so typical of any relatively powerless outsider group that begins to frame its own self-defined standpoint in hierarchical power relations of race, class, gender, and, in their case, age. Some blamed the victim, claiming that "he had no business being hear that elevator anyhow." Others condemned his mother for being at work while it happened. "Why couldn't she stay home like she was supposed to?" one little girl queried. Still others wanted to "tell somebody" that something was wrong with the way that the people in their community were treated. One little girl summed it up "It's not fair, Miss Hill," she stated. "It's just not fair." For me this incident marked an important milestone in my growing recognition of the culpability of ideas in hierarchical power relations. Described by sociologist Dorothy Smith as a "complex of organized practices, including government, law, business and financial management, professional organizations, and educational institutions as well as the discourses in texts that interpenetrate the multiple sites of power," power relations, or relations of ruling, permeate all aspects of everyday life. However, where Dorothy Smith's relations of ruling emphasize gender dichotomies that work with and through the economic class relations characterizing advanced capitalism, relations of ruling also encompass race, age, sexuality, and nationality. Within these hierarchical power relations, the ideas produced by elite groups about community, difference, voice, justice, and many other topics matter. As Teun Van Dijk observes, "Elites have the means to manufacture consent. ... This does not mean that all opinions of elites are always adopted by the public at large, but only that their opinions are well known, that they have the most effective means of public persuasion and the best resources for suppressing or marginalizing alternative opinions." Since those days of teaching second graders, I have come to see the importance to preschool through postgraduate education, collectively known as the Curriculum, to hierarchical power relations. Consisting of a body of knowledge accompanied by a specific constellation of classroom practices and administrative structures, the Curriculum operates as a contested location for knowledges of all sorts. One the one hand, the legitimated Curriculum includes the knowledge that most interests elite groups. Unfortunately, this public transcript far too often presents one version of the truth as being the only, ideal, and superior version. Moreover, such truth is often developed through racial segregation, gender homogeneity, and other exclusionary practices. Hierarchy occupies a central role in this Curriculum, where the goal for teachers and students alike lies in learning one s place in the pecking order. Despite the seeming hegemony of this Curriculum, it also sparks all sorts of rebellion. Thus, on the other hand, the Curriculum can and does generate critical thinking that leads to many unintended consequences. Although far too many classrooms present the Curriculum as universal truth, they simultaneously provide potential spaces of participatory democracy.... All groups need to see how their views of truths remain limited by the workings of unjust power relations. In this sense, all groups potentially benefit from participating in a more broadly defined critical social theory. Just as the writers of my second graders' textbook on community failed to take my students' lives into account and thereby produced an impoverished text, the limited horizons of my second graders, imposed by the harsh conditions of their lives, restricted them to a similarly diminished understanding of community. The difference in these truths lay, in part, in the ability of one group to mandate that its view of community prevail over competing interpretations. We are still quite far from a more democratic critical social theory that encourages textbook writers to take the lives of children like my second graders into account. Although it is theoretically possible for members of elite groups to relinquish privilege and to participate in a collaborative effort to develop critical social theory of the sort I envision, few actually do. Thus, the task of being critical continues to fall most heavily on those who are closest to the bottom. NOTE: This excerpt is from Patricia Hill Collins's book Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Social Justice Hill Collins is the Charles Phelps Taft Professor of Sociology and head in the African American studies department. It is reprinted with permission from the University of Minnesota Press.