Excerpts from If I Were Your Teacher; TEA uses this piece and other pieces from James Baldwin to ask deeply purposeful questions about why we teach and what our moral obligation is to our students during a time of species extinction, ecosystem collapse and impending planetary upheaval at all levels.

 Excerpts from If I Were Your Teacher

by James Baldwin

One of the purposes of education is to question the purpose of this education.

I began to be bugged by the teaching of American History because it seemed that that history had been accomplished without my presence and this had a very demoralizing effect on me when I was your age and younger and had a demoralizing effect for quite a few years thereafter.

Speaking as though I were your teacher, my responsibility to you would be to invest you with all of the morale that I could to prepare you for the terrible storm, which is called life, terrible and beautiful. But you must know that it is both.

It is my responsibility to give you as true a version of your history as I can, since it is through your sense of your history that you arrive at your identity.

Although society is under the obligation to educate all of its citizens, it is also under the obligation to discourage people from educating them to think too much.

If I were your teacher, and I knew that you were beginning to wonder what you were doing in school in the first place, and what waited for you outside, what good was it for you to be here since nothing that happened here prepared you for outside. Knowing your bitterness and not trying for a moment to pretend that it is not justified, I’d yet have to suggest to you that the problems that you face you have to make them personal.

We come back again to the war between society and thought; it is your responsibility as young American citizens to understand that the standards by which you are confronted and by which many of you are so visibly and obviously victimized, and others of you who are not so obviously but equally victimized, are not the only standards in the world.

Finally, if I were your teacher, I would beg you to insist to fight with me and not let me get away with anything. No matter how I may sound I am really only mortal, and I love you very much and feel responsible for you, I am not always right. We depend on each other, the old and the young; to learn from each other. I would beg you to ask me why for example, the history books are the way they are. And I would beg you to force me to answer if you asked me “what relevance your education has to concrete problems, such as…”

If I were you, I would force me, ask me the most difficult questions that you can. And I would not be able to answer them. My responsibility is to hear them. And when you ask your question, any question, you begin to know more about what you really think.