Freedom with Maxine Green

Greene, Maxine. The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College, 1988. Print.


Freedom. Freedom is a tricky concept in an eighth grade English classroom. If you ask students about freedom, they will see it means that you are free to do whatever you want. If I ask them what sort of freedom they'd like, it might be choosing their seats, deciding what book they want to read, chewing gum in class, and going to the bathroom or getting a drink of water without having to ask permission.  I think these are fairly reasonable until, when students choose their own seats, that they inevitably leave other students isolated or may even find that sitting next to their friend negatively impacts their learning but can't say so because of peer pressure. Is that freedom? It also makes perfect sense for students to choose the books they read on their own or even coming to some consensus about what we read in class, but will they choose to read Tree Girl, the story of a Maya girl in Guatemala caught between the guerrillas and soldiers in a brutal civil war? Does it matter? Will they choose books to extend their world vision or that challenge their conception of gender, class, and race? It that freedom? And when a student tells me that she only needs to know how to read children's books because she is going to have a baby as soon as she can, is she free? As I read and respond to Maxine Green's The Dialect of Freedom, I see her complicating the freedom in the way I have been thinking about democracy. I have been talking about "thick" democracy, and while she does not use the same language, she argues for a "thick" understanding of freedom, one that is dialectical. Here, Green is not interested in liberty, meaning the government contract or political rights where free choice can be made. Instead, Green explores freedom as in the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities. What are the obstacles that education can help remove so that the choices can be made possible to our students? And  then what possibilities can education offer beyond consumerism and competition?

What is freedom in the space of a classroom? What kind of opportunities for articulation of freedom ought to be present in that space?  What is the "appearance of freedom" and then what IS freedom? It is not enough to say choice is freedom, for if we have a moral and ethical point of view of freedom, freedom of choice, especially for a child, is not in and of itself moral. Maxine Green writes The Dialectic of Freedom with the hope to "remind people of what it means to be alive among others, to achieve freedom in dialogue with others for the sake of personal fulfillment and the emergence of a democracy dedicated to life and decency" (xii). This hope moves thin notions of freedom (such as choice) to a more thick notion of freedom, one that is  situated in the context of social living and social responsibility. The nature of education today is individualistic and competitive, completely outside the realm of the social with its emphasis on testing, evaluation, and competition among states and countries.  Although written in 1988, Green's book resonates amidst the recent public debate amplified by the Chicago Teachers' Union strike this September. Teachers are not concerned with pay right now;  they are concerned with the emphasis on testing and teacher evaluation based on those tests. Teachers are concerned with the conditions of teaching (e.g., longer school days, the elimination of arts and music education, "teacher-proof" curricula, and overcrowded classrooms). The routine and unimaginative conditions of the testing era launched by A Nation at Risk and perpetuated by No Child Left Behind, is the antithesis of a citizenship education lacking the core value of democracy: freedom.

Green asks what is being communicated to our youth and thus perpetuated  in our society? What public values are living in the discourse of the classroom? In the discourse of individualism and competition, there is an absence of caring for others of even recognizing the shared public space:

There is a general withdrawal from what ought to be public concerns. Messages and announcements fill the air; but there is, because of the withdrawal, a widespread speechlessness, a silence where there might be -- where there ought to be -- an impassioned and significant dialogue." (2)

If the dialogue is nonexistent, if no language is uttered in this space, then there is no opportunity for real learning. What is happening is a reproduction or a transmission of information. If you can reproduce the information or if you can learn the rules to properly transmit the ideas being measured, then you will be repeating not communicating. This is not learning; this is not growth. We are free, according to Dewey in Experience, Nature, and Freedom, "not because of what we statistically are, but in so far as we are becoming different from what we have been" (1960, 280).  Of course, from a moral and ethical point of view, this "becoming different" would hopefully be more intelligent and humane. What, then, are the conditions necessary for students to choose and to act on those choices? Green reminds us that such choice and action "both occur within and by means of ongoing transactions with objective conditions and with other human beings...and must be grounded, at least to a degree, in an awareness of a world lived in common with others, a world that can be to some extent transformed" (4).



Green argues for education to "encourage free and informed choosing within a social context where ideas could be developed in the open air of public discussion and communication," and so the word "informed" here is was is essential to notions of freedom. Between ignorant and informed lives the dialectical relation or tension that Green argues is essential in the logic of freedom. Every human situation or what she calls "situatedness" offers a relation -- between subject and object, individual and environment, self and society, outsider and community, and the living consciousness and  phenomenal world (8). The idea here, is that education helps students to name alternatives and imagine an alternative state of things, and this happens in a situation or in a shared project. Students will assert their autonomy, but is it an informed autonomy? Are they really choosing if their consciousness is "anchored or submerged" (9).

In other words, students will only have an awareness of freedom if they have something they want to say and are not allowed to say it; if they have a dream and can name the obstacle to that dream. We, as teachers,  can share examples of  awareness of freedom in the curriculum in history, literature, music, and art. Green suggests the following: language and poetry of solidarity in Poland;  underground songs of the Soviet Union;  demonstrations in Chile;  schoolchildren protest in South Africa;  stories of people working and fighting in collaboration with one another discovering together a power to act. What are students choosing to do today?

The work of the classroom, the work of education is to provoke individuals to reach beyond themselves into their intersubjective space, to think about what they're doing,  to become mindful,  to share meaning,  to conceptualize their lived worlds. Many classrooms are what Green calls "consumer classrooms," and one can hear the discourse of measurement that Cintron talks about in Angels' Town as teachers talk about grades, setting goals to earn a few points in their RIT score (NWEA testing), creating activities that are point-based, and even giving "bucks" for good behavior within the popular RTI program of PBIS. The consumer classroom,  the competition classroom,  the test classroom,  the teacher-proof classroom does not release opportunities to conceptualize their lived world. Green argues that teachers can render problematic a reality that includes homelessness,   hunger,  pollution, crime,  censorship,  arms buildup, and  threats of war. She reminds us that a teacher in search of her own freedom maybe the only kind of teacher who can arouse young persons to go in search of their own:  "Children who have been provoked to reach beyond themselves,  to wonder, to imagine,  to pose their own questions are the ones most likely to learn to learn"(14).

Green talks about the  dialectic of freedom as an awareness of freedom and oppression;  for example,  some would not find a situation to be intolerable if they had no possibility of transformation in mind, if they had been unable to imagine a better state of things; I think for many of my students there is no dialectic of freedom because they are unable to imagine a better state things; they cannot name the obstacles as Green suggests, but they cannot even name what lies beyond the obstacles. There is no desire for that something. For example, many of my eighth grade female students are looking forward to getting their period so that they can have a baby like their older sister did. They spend their time after school taking care of their niece or nephew and see this lived world as inevitable and desirable.

The current rhetoric  of education is the rhetoric of modernity. There is a discourse of freedom,  but it is a discourse emphasizing free choice and self-reliance and  people overcoming dependency and taking responsibility for themselves --  like the early days of capitalism. In this election season, you can hear this in  the rhetoric of the Republican platform:  deregulation, noninterference, and privatization (17). In the classroom, students hear a similar rhetoric. Students who began their formal education in our school district in 2004 have been hearing the logic of measurement for years -- the same students who can't afford the required physical to play sports at school, who have joined gangs, look forward to being a teenage mom, and have been sitting in an ESL class for 8 years because they can't pass the ACCESS test. What is silenced in this rhetoric of freedom situated in the discourse of measurement are the social programs considered wasteful and injurious to character that might support these kids when they need better housing, medical attention, and extra curricular opportunities. Few if any of the kids "left behind" are in the art and music classes because they are in "intervention classes." Few if any of these kids play sports at school or participate in the play. Are they free? Students would say that they are free -- as in not enslaved -- but they are still subservient to a system that they cannot name according to Green.

Green's book explores the problem of freedom and the diverse experiences of freedom as she surveys the history of American literature and our collective memory;  therefore, her work fits nicely with my idea of the literature if atrocity in that we are both interested in making space in the English classroom for something much more political that can unveil and name the lived world of our students by situating it in relation to the other.  Green reminds us that there is no orientation to bring something into being if  there is no awareness of something lacking in a situation,  and this is where choice is not enough;  it must be informed choice;  it must be choice with awareness, and  that must be choice in a dialectic.

Let's start with freedom as the foundation of our curricula. The dictatorship,  occupation,  persecution,  genocide: the dialectic can begin when students know the obstacles to freedom. And here is where the dialectic gets complex;  take for example the guerrillas in  Guatemala. The guerrillas as a revolutionary movement challenged what they viewed as total repression enacting violence in the name of freedom. Green reminds us that it is nearly impossible to associate freedom as a goal with any universal concept of what is right or good, and so a curriculum about freedom will unveil the problematic of choice.

Green quotes Mann who believed that education could stop the tendency of "domination of capital and the servility of labor since no intelligent body of men could be permanently poor." School would teach moral law, self-control, and the intelligence needed to maintain a republican government; school would protect against bigotry and violence,  and students would come to name the obstacles to their project of freedom. Students would learn to refused to believe that conditions are unchangeable.  What does the school see as moral? What is the school's idea of a republican government? The rhetoric of modernity has altered this conception of education.

In the classroom,  we can engage with not from the vantage point of society or the system  but from the vantage points of  actors or agents in an unpredictable world,  and we have seen  the capacity to take initiatives, to begin transformation. In Green's  chapter "Reading from Private to Public: The Work of Women," she explores several literary texts and asks how much does the possibility of freedom depend on  critical reflection,self understanding, and insight into the world? And how much does it depend on being with others in a caring relationship? How much depends on actually coming together with unknown others in a similar predicament and in existential project reaching toward what is not yet? (79)

Green talks about Alice Walker's The Color Purple and how the Celie is able to survive because of the support she receives from the blues singer Shug Avery, who becomes her teacher and friend; Green writes, "Through a connection, she moves Celie not only to put questions to her familiar world but to begin to name it and act so that she can transform, through her own actions, her own life. Clearly she could not have done so alone" (104). And I think here is where I want to say that our work as teaches is not to decide for our students what life they should live or ought to live. Education is about consciousness. Some student can not notice the lived world when they are so preoccupied with survival (or seeking validation, or escaping). Not noticing,  she (Celie) could not question.  "When she questions, a space opens for her. She know she needs to take initiatives,  that she has to name the "man" if she is to see. She has been, in some familiar and deadly way, oppressed" (104).

Green talks about what the curricula must include. She argues  for the voices of participants or near participants in our lived world such as front-line soldiers, factory workers, and slaves. Silenced voices need to be heard for a new understanding, one with perplexity and uncertainty to be disclosed.  This opens up new spaces for study "metaphorical spaces" and places for "speculative audacity." They draw to mind what lies beyond the  boundaries and often to what is not yet. People become more and more aware of the unanswered questions, the unexplored corners, the nameless faces behind forgotten windows;  these are the obstacles to be transcended. (128).