Curriculum as Public Spaces

Curriculum as public space can be thought of as an attempt to broaden the sense of education in a way such that every member of society can develop and use all of his or her capacities and powers without [Page 191]infringing upon the basic conditions or rights of others. The classroom—society itself—becomes an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

In 1963, a young civil rights worker proposed to create a network of Freedom Schools across the South as a way to re-energize and refocus the civil rights movement. He noted that although Black people had been denied many things—decent facilities, fully trained teachers, forward-looking curriculum—the fundamental injury was a denial of the right to think for themselves about the conditions of their lives, how they came to be the way they were, and how they might be changed. This idea initiated a public curriculum of questions: Why are we in the freedom movement? What do we want that we do not have? What do we have that we want to keep? Pursuing these questions, teachers taught the three R's (reading, writing, and arithmetic) and so much more: how to take oneself seriously as a thinking person; how to locate one's life in the contexts of culture and history, political power, and economic condition; and how to imagine and then actively work toward a new society.

Over the next several years Freedom Schools were launched all over the country, and not just in schools, but in community centers, churches, parks, and coffee shops—in fact, in any space where people gathered together to face one another in dialogue. It was sometimes wild and unruly, always noisy and diverse, and yet it had several common edges: teachers and leaders became students of their students, the extraordinary ordinary people; students were active participants in their own learning rather than the inert and passive receptacles of someone else's ideas; consumers became citizens and objectified people transformed themselves into subjects and history makers; teaching and learning was recast as having a larger purpose than occupational training—the fullest participation possible in the world we share, including the development of capacities to change ourselves and to change that world. People got a taste then of curriculum as public space, curriculum characterized by its open access and its propulsive midwifery properties.

In many ways, Martin Luther King, Jr. was the emblematic practitioner of curriculum as public space. He performed on a vast stage, and indeed his classroom was all of society; he asked in a thousand ways what was of most value, what was fair and just; he urged voyages and transformations for himself and for participants in the Black freedom movement and for all within the sound of his voice or the sight of his activities; he grew and changed as conditions evolved and developed.

Curriculum is, of course, never neutral—it always has a value, a position, and a politics. For humanists, the value of education and curriculum is its identity with the general quest for human enlightenment and human liberation. Its driving principle is the unity of all humanity, the conviction that every human being is of incalculable value, entitled to decent and universal standards concerning freedom and justice and education, and that any violations, deliberate or inadvertent, must be resisted.

...