Retrieving the Language of Compassion: The Education Professor in Search of Community

Abstract

There are moments when many of us sense an odd distance between the ethos of teacher education and the lived lives of the publics to whom we hope the schools can respond. There are moments when I feel a similar gap between ourselves and many of the teachers in those schools. I have some of our normatives in mind, our styles of explanations, our ways of putting things. To be conscious of this cannot but raise questions about our purposes as educators and the relation between those purposes and what might be called public opinion in its diverse spheres and domains. Given the times we are living in, it may also stir up a set of questions respecting democracy and pluralism and community. At this moment of breaking walls abroad (and breaking windows), of calls for freedom and increasing supplies of consumer goods, we are surely obligated to reflect on what we mean by a free society we who live and teach at the very heart of consumerism. We are obligated to ask ourselves what we have in mind when we speak of a good society. How do we adjust community commitments to private loyalties or parochial faiths? How do we reconcile the demands of multiculturalism with the requirements of civic life? How do we relate spiritual longings to the desire for goods and more goods? How do we cultivate free expression in the glare of the media and in the shadows of technical control? What of equality and social justice? What of the workings of power? Not only ought our reflections feed into our collaborative choosing. They have much to do with what we communicate and how we communicate to parents, teachers, administrators, and (indirectly) to the young themselves. An indifference to the poor and the needy is increased by what often appears to be official neglect. At once, growing economic uncertainty and a feeling of vulnerability bring prejudices and stereotypes into the open, atti

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