Alright everyone…I want you to close your eyes with me and remember:

Before the internet or the MAC. Before proficiencies and state ratings for teachers. Remember hide and seek at dusk? The corner store, the smell of the sun and licking salty lips? Wait… an ice cream cone on a soft summer night; walking to school no matter the weather; laughing so hard until your stomach hurts? When nearly every mom was at home when the kids got there; when laundry detergent had glasses, dishes, or towels hidden inside the box? When all of your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had their hair done? When they threatened to keep a child back a year when they failed… and did? When being sent to the principal’s office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited us when we got home?

Doesn’t that feel good just to go back for a moment and say…yes I remember that. Remember when decisions were made by saying,  “Eeny, meeny, miney, mo”? Mistakes were corrected by the simple words,” do over”. Race issues meant arguing about who ran the fastest, money issues were handled by whoever the banker was at Monopoly. The worse thing you could catch from the opposite sex was the Cooties, having a weapon in school meant getting caught with a slingshot. If you can remember most of all of these, then most would say…we have lived !

Remember where you were when you first decided to get into education?  I dare say some were on a porch with cousins or friends at hand.  One person was assigned to be the teacher (usually the person who donated the house and supplies) and the others merrily played the class, displaying antics that only a summer afternoon of moxy could provide.  Perhaps you were in a high school classroom listening to the sonnets of Barrett or Browning.  Were you feeling the pain of your brothers going to Vietnam or Korea? Were you also inspired by the teachers of the day who still allowed participation in world war games?  Wherever you were, the seed was first sown and the direction beginning to find its chartered course.

Remember where you were when you finished college and knew that YOU could make a difference?  We were going to stamp out prejudice…social injustices, poverty, and illiteracy.  We were heady at the freedoms of the sixties and early seventies…ready to claim our place in the halls of ivy.  We were inspired by Mr. Chips and his sensitivity; we sang "To Sir With Love”; watched the determination of Conrack; each honoring our own personal classroom hero,  and we cried with Sandy Dennis in Up the Down Staircase as our illusions about how easy it would all be…slowly started to disintegrate.

Remember where you were when you first heard of Summerhill or Montessori…and knew that you too would find the path to a more functional and innovative educational system?  Hopefully some of these memories still bring a kind reflection of our naiveté, our promise and our hearts.  Perhaps we can even still smile. Because you see, no one of any measure in education made the decision to become a teacher without some consideration of heart.

Think back and remember what your life was like at that time.  Remember the endless electric excitement on a Friday night when you knew there were dances…football games that cut the silence of a golden sunny fall afternoon…Saturday afternoon jobs that became a movie at a Sunday matinee….family outings…picnics…and your town where boy met girl…boy dated girl…boy married girl…and their children went to the same schools.  There was predictability….a comfort…and an excitement that we truly could be who and what we wanted to be.

As we sit and remember…then we also must bear the responsibility of what went wrong.  Where did these dreams go? Where did the institutions that were going to protect our dreams go…and finally, where have all the children gone?

Step from the sixties and the seventies into the veiled changes of the eighties to the consequences that colored the state of education in the 90’...to where we are today.  You have watched faces of excitement turn to discouragement. Numbers replaced programs and many liberal arts programs became the dinosaurs of the atomic age.  What has happened to the children that we once were?

They typically come home after school, and watch the younger brothers and sisters while mom and/or dad work to try to meet the expenses of a changing age.  They clean house, cook meals, do homework and when their parents come home, they are ready to play.  The parents tired after the hours entailed in each of their jobs are beaten.  They cannot take one more point of stress in an already too long day.  Children are indulged and go to their rooms to watch their televisions and VCR’s. 

They listen to music hoping to learn what once any parent would have taught.  Their friends have become their mentors…inspiration, and sadly in many many cases…the family unit…and that unit has become the street. Cars boom out angry anthems to a defeat that we simply cannot understand. The freedom that most of us enjoyed in being able to only go to school and handle part time jobs,  has now become a reality of full time jobs... parents who are not home... parents who are gone to drugs, depression, poverty…and broken promises of a future that is no longer guaranteed.

Parents have watched their companies that they have served in many cases since teenage years or at least college, close down…no American Dream ahead for them! Teachers have watched the classes that embraced art and music being replaced by the electronic age….debate and discussion is being replaced by armitrons...who now respond accordingly to standardized everything…curriculums…work sheets, tests. Children have had no voice for so long that they are afraid of even attempting.  Because of our time constraints within our public schools, we do not have the time nor the avenues to introduce them to the wonders of their own spirit. In some cases we expose them to the defeat of our own.

Where are the teachers now?  Where is the excitement and love of learning?   Where is the Spirit of Education?

It feels to some of us who have long revered education as its greatest treasure, that there is a problem in these institutions of learning that is becoming a focus for future trial.  There is a feeling of hopelessness and a great division between students, faculty, and administrations. Common goals have become lost to uncommon battlegrounds.  We all know that what will transform education is not another theory or another book or another formula but a transformed way of being in the world.  This world is changing…students are changing, teachers are changing, and parents are coping with just making it through another day.  Administrators are now politicians, they have lost the light of the responsibility that they protect in their teachers and their students.  In the midst of the familiar trappings of educational competitions, intellectual combat, obsession with a narrow range of facts, credits, and credentials, we seek a life illumined by spirit and infused with soul.  I pray that I may bring some true gratitude and respect to all of you who are the champions of our children. You are truly the keepers of a wondrous faith.

When I was in Dayton, Ohio a couple of years ago I became familiar with a wonderful school called the Allen School.  I was asked to help “inspire” there and to help celebrate their successes.  This was an inner city school in a long forgotten town.  It was for many years at the bottom of the list in that city by all measures.  There were fifth graders who had parole officers.  The dropout rate was incredible and saddening.  Cameras loomed from halls; children were searched upon entry of the buildings.  The failure of those students in every aspect of their lives sickened the heart.  Along came a new principal, a principal who it is relevant to note came from the Philippines, a culture which has an inherent respect for things spiritual in a way that many American culture does not. This wonderful man brought a diversity of cultures and richness of heritage to the forefront.  He brought the teachers together and said to them, in substance, as his very first proclamation as principal, that:

“We have to start to understand that the young people we are working with have nothing of external substance or support. They have dangerous neighborhoods.  They have poor places to live.  They have little food to eat.  They have parents who are on the ropes and barely able to pay attention to them.  The externals with which American education is obsessed would not work in this situation.  These students have one thing that no one can take away from them.  They have their souls.  And from this day forth in this school, we are going to lift them up.  We are going to make those souls visible to the young people themselves and to their parents and to the community.  We are going to celebrate them, and we are going to reground their lives in the power that they can allow themselves.  That will require that this faculty recover the power of their own souls, remembering that we, too, are soul-driven, soul-animated creatures.” 

In a five-year period, the Allen School in Dayton, Ohio, rose to the top of every dimension on which it had been at the bottom not only through hard work, through disciplined work, but through attentiveness to the inward factors that we are here to explore.  This is not romanticism.  This is the real world.  This is what is desperately needed in so many sectors of American education.  I was very proud to be a part of their five-year celebration.  I am even more pleased to bring the challenge of regaining the Spirit of Learning back to the schools.

There are some amazing things to remember about the soul as we explore it.  It is like a wild animal.  Tough, self-sufficient, resilient, but also exceedingly shy.  Remember that if we go crashing through the woods, screaming and yelling for the soul to come out, it will evade us all both by day and  night.  We cannot beat the bushes and yell at each other if we expect this precious inwardness to emerge. If you are willing to go into the woods and sit quietly at the base of a tree, that wild animal will, after a few hours, reveal itself to you.  Out of the corner of your eye, you will glimpse something of the wild preciousness that we are looking for now.

As the Quakers say: “We ask ourselves for guidance and hold this entire question in the light, to be here, to be present to each other in the right spirit, speaking our truth gently and simply, listening respectfully and attentively to the truth of others, grounded in our own experience and expanded by experiences that are not yet ours, compassionate toward that which we do not yet understand, not only as a kindness to others but for the sake of our growth and our students and the transformation of education”.  Is that not our one hope and desire for life itself?

In preparing these remarks, I’ve asked myself what am I trying to do here?

For whatever it is worth these are images that have come to me as I’ve tried to put a larger frame of personal meaning to this question. I think we are here to seek life- giving forces and sources in the midst of an enterprise that is too often death dealing. It may seem harsh to call some facets of education as death dealing, but I think that we have all had examples of that through our own experience.

I am always astonished and saddened by the fact that this country, which has the most widespread public education system in the world, has so many people who walk around feeling stupid because they feel that they are the losers in a competitive system of teaching and learning.  It is a system that dissects life and distances us from the world because it is rooted in fear.

I see children who come out of schools not wanting to learn again. Too many children have their birthright gift of the love of learning taken away from them by the very process  that is to enhance that gift; we seek forces and sources that are life-giving in the midst of a system that is too often uninspired.

Everyone here has had his or her own encounter with the forces of death of spirit: racism, sexism, justice denied. I found that I had a depression that came from a hunger for feeling spirit again.

But somewhere, somehow, a miracle happened. I was a kid who someone believed in. My life was designed by teachers. The first were the elders of my tribe. I was named by John Fire Lame deer who taught me that I had a responsibility to change the world of the Indian. I studied ferociously hard, afraid of a world that I felt, had no real place for me. My parents built their life on an anthem that education was the greatest gift to ourselves.

My father told me as a teenager, “Do well Niya Sue, because education will be the one thing that no one can take away."

I believe that will be the greatest legacy that I can give my children, and to my children’s children of the seventh generation. It became clear to me, after growing up in a place that in recent years was declared “ground zero” by president Clinton, that we would not only need to embrace the philosophies of inspiration, but also the realities of perspiration.

Children of my tribe, children of the tribes of man, in cities, in the country, would also need to be shown skills that could bring pride and economic growth to the tired finances of too much growth. You teachers of career and technical education, I am here to tell you, gave us hope, gave us confidence, taught us reality, taught us productivity, made us contributors.

We live in the houses you built, nourish our bodies with the food you have grown, broadened our minds through technologies that many in this room not only created, but also pioneered, and drive to wondrous vistas in machines you have advanced.

My grandfather, who the Lakota call Tunkashila, said that words are dust, until we give them life, through living them. You educators are the life givers and to you I humbly bow. From this realization I wish to bridge the space between spirit and education.   I became immersed in a spark of light.  I became a passionate student. I was on my way to finding my Mr. Chips. In doing that I started to find answers.

Answers came in the way I was formed in the educational systems of this country.  We were produced to live out of the top inch and a half of the human self, to live only with cognitive rationality and with the powers of the intellect, out of touch with anything that lay below that top inch and a half.  Body, intuition, feeling, emotion, relationships…were sacrificed.  This may surprise you that I would put the responsibility of this on an educational system that I do not work within, but I find that this was indeed how I was trained for life, but I will also say this, Career and Technical education gave birth to endless possibilities to me.

A major influence in my life has been that wonderful novel, Once And Future King. This is a passage in which the young Arthur, king to be, in his depression, his dark night of the soul, has sought counsel from Merlin, the magician, who was his mentor. Speaking to the young Arthur, Merlin says,

“The best thing for being sad is to learn something.  That is the only thing that never fails.  You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies.  You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins.  You may miss your only love.  You may see the world around you devastated by evil lunatics or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds.

There is only one thing for it, then: To learn.  Learn why the world wags and what wags it.  That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.  Learning is the thing for you.”

“Learning is the thing for you.” What Merlin knows, as he advises the young Arthur, is that education at its best (these profound human transactions called knowing, teaching, and learning) is not just about information, and certainly not only about getting jobs.  It is about healing.  It is about wholeness.  It is about empowerment, liberation, and transcendence.  It is about reclaiming the vitality of life.

The question that we must wrestle with, I think, is why there is so little life-giving power in our culture when we use the words education, teaching, and learning. How do these words and the things they point to in our culture become so flat, so dull, so banal, compared to Merlin’s understanding?

Of course, there are many answers to that question and I am merely a psychologist, not an educator.  From where I can see, the industrial model of schooling that is still with us from the 19th century has diminishing effects of professionalism in teacher training.  The way education has devolved into political rhetoric has taken it from the power and handed it to the powerless.  The answer I want to explore is a different one.  I want to propose that education is dull because we have driven the sacred out of it. 

Merlin, the magician, understood the sacredness at the heart of all things, and learning was a natural derivative of that.  I do not want people to feel that sacred is an espousing of religious tenets.  It is merely the realization in the sanctity and preciousness of life and its lessons.  I want to explore what it might mean to reclaim the sacred at the heart of knowing, teaching, and learning; to reclaim it from this essentially depressive mode of a knowing which honors only data, logic, analysis, and a systematic disconnection of self from the world.

I want to remind us all that the marriage of education and the spirit has not always been a happy one.  It has not always produced creative offspring.  Ask Galileo.  Ask a Native American child subjected to American school prayer.  Ask anyone whose family or history was touched by the Nazis’ murderous attachment of the sacred to blood, soil, and race.  There are real dangers in this enterprise when the sacred gets attached to the wrong things.  There are real dangers when it becomes institutionalized and imposed on people as one more weapon in the objectifying forces of this or any other society.

We need to have the courage to jump into the midst of that mess.  The Nazi story, the murderous results of the Third Reich, is not only about the attachment of the sacred to the wrong things by a political system of power; it’s also about German higher education refusing to get involved with those kinds of issues.  Distancing itself, clinging to logic and data and objectiveness as a way of staying disengaged from the social reality of its time.  It is an extinction of the human spirit.

We can no longer afford a system of education that refuses to get engaged with the mess.  We must be willing to join life where it is its grittiest…where sacred begins.

What do I mean by the sacred?  I remember when I was a small child my first yearning for the sacred, which was only a word for me when I was young.  I had merely heard it in church, and I wanted an experience of it.

I knew that sacred was my people, my way of life according to my elders, The Idea of the Holy. The Idea of the Holy.  I could only have an idea of it because I didn’t have an experience of it.  Over the years, I’ve struggled to move from the level of idea to the embodied life.

It is a very simple definition that says that the sacred is that which is worthy of respect. As soon as we see that, the sacred is everywhere.  There is nothing, when rightly understood, that it is not worthy of respect.

How it would transform academic life if we could practice simple respect!  I don’t think there are many places where people feel less respect than they do on university campuses.  The university is a place that has learned to grant respect to only a few things: to the text, to the expert, to those who win in competition.

We do not grant respect to students if they stumble and fail.  We do not grant respect to tentative and heartfelt ways of being in the world where the person can’t quite think of the right word or can’t think of any word at all.  We don’t grant respect to silence and wonder.  We don’t grant it to voices outside our comfortable circle, let alone to the voiceless things of the world.

Why? In academic culture, I am carefully buffered, carefully walled off, through systematic disrespect, from all of those things that might challenge me, break me, open me, and change me.  It is a fearful culture. I have long seen career and technical education, as a release from this separation.

One of the things we have to do is to remember the counsel at the heart of every great spiritual tradition: Be not afraid.  BE NOT AFRAID.  Interesting words.  The words do not say you’re not supposed to have fear.  I have fear.  I have fear as I stand here before you.  How am I doing?  Do they like me?  Am I delivering on all the preparation I’ve put into this talk? Am I letting these people before me know how truly precious they are to me?

If we could reclaim the sacred simple respect in education, how would it transform our knowing, teaching, and learning.”

First, if we could recover a sense of the spirit in knowing, teaching, and learning, we would recover our sense of the otherness of the things of the world.

One of the greatest sins in education is reductionism.  The destruction of that precious otherness by cramming everything into categories that we find comfortable, ignoring data, ignoring writers, ignoring voices, ignoring information, ignoring simple facts that don’t fit into our shoebox, because we don’t have a respect for otherness.  We have a fear of it that comes from having flattened the terrain and stripping it.  A people who know the spirit, know accountability of our children, and we don’t know that anymore.

When we teach about third-world cultures in ways that confine them, make them measure up to our standards of what greatness or excellence is supposed to be like, we ignore their powerful richness.  These cultures have more to teach us than we have yet to understand or imagine about real values, about community, about respect, about the sacred, yet they come out, by our measures, as shabby, dirty, dusty, lacking in merit. Too many students have learned, through that reductionist model, disrespect for the otherness of the things of the world…their world.  Discipline has become the dissection of the spirit in our power to control the classroom……the quick barb…the insult...the gesture…the smoking barrel of a gun.

We do it with great literature too.  This is done not only on the right, it’s done on the left as well.  We do it with great literature where the story itself may convey powerful messages about the human condition, but because its author does not measure up to current tests of rightness or credibility, the text gets dismissed.  A writer named David Denby has said, “What a convenient way of making the professor and students superior to the text, by not respecting the otherness of that voice and engaging it on its own terms”.  So, the first thing that a people who know the sacred would know in education is the precious otherness of the things of the world.

The second thing that such a people would know is the precious inwardness of the things of the world.

We don’t respect inwardness of the things we study and we therefore do not respect the inward learning that those things have for us.

I have thought often and painfully about the murderous history of the Third Reich that I learned from some of the best colleges in this country. Good historians taught me its history, some of whom were award winning.  I was taught the history of Nazi Germany in a way (and I’ve never known how to say this) that made me feel that somehow all of that murderousness had happened to another species on another planet.  My teachers were not revisionists.  They weren’t saying it didn’t happen.  It happened. They taught the statistics and the facts and the theories behind the facts, but they presented them at such objective arm’s length, just the facts and only the facts, that it never connected with the inwardness of my life, because the inwardness of those events was never revealed to me.  All was objectified, all was externalized, and I ended up morally and spiritually cheated, I think.

There are two things that I failed to learn from the history courses that I took on Nazi Germany that I should have learned and learned painfully only in later years. Growing up on the reservations of this land I learned that what was taught as having happened on a continent lifemiles away….was also a product of my experience.  I know what it was like to live with the voice that said, “We don’t want to live with you.” I knew the Trail of Tears, The battle of Wounded Knee, The Sand Creek massacres. Why weren’t these connected?

I should have been taught that.  My little story and the inwardness of my life should have been connected with the inward dynamics of that history in a way that would have helped me understand my own time, my own place, and my own involvement in the same evil, because without that, there was no way for me to grow morally.

FIND our passions.  Remember how exciting it is to hear a person’s first hand account of a historical landmark in the forming of our lives?  Remember how much fun it is to have a discussion that allows you to see the student’s heart and not just the scowl that is usually presented to you?  Remember what it was like to read that first poem that stirred your soul and how you could not wait to share it? 

By recovering the spirit of these memories, we could recover our sense of community with each other and with all of creation, the community that Thomas Merton  a wonderful catholic scholar and writer, named so beautifully as “the hidden wholeness”. I have become increasingly convinced that the recovery of the community is absolutely at the heart of good teaching.

I’m amazed by the fact that good teachers use a million different techniques. Good teaching isn’t about technique.  I’ve asked students around the country to describe their good teachers to me.  Some of them describe people who lecture all the time, some of them describe people who do little other than group process, and others describe everything in between.

But all of them talk about people who have some sort of connective capacity, who somehow connect the students and the subject being studied and the students to each other.

One young woman told me she couldn’t possibly describe her good teachers because they were all so different from each other, but she could easily describe her bad teachers because they were all the same.  They gave her as a student the feeling that she was a number, taking up space, part of a percentage of a statistic that would be on someone’s desk at the end of the semester. Had this woman not has inspiration from her career and technical program, I do not know where she might have ended up. Where I met her was at Johns Hopkins University hospital where she was an intern, taking a workshop that I was teaching on ethics in medicine and social responsibility.

There is a distance, a coldness, and a lack of community because in a secularized academy, we don’t have the connective tissue of the spirit to hold this apparent fragmentation and chaos together.  Merton is right.  It’s a wholeness, but it’s a hidden wholeness.  It’s so easy to look on the surface of things and say there is no community here at all. If you go deep, the way you go when you seek that which is sacred, you find the hidden wholeness.  You find the community that a good teacher evokes and invites students into, that somehow weaves and reweaves life together.

Community goes far beyond our face-to-face relationship with each other as human beings.  In education especially, this community connects us with what the poet Rilke called the great things of the world and with the grace of great things.

We are in community with all of it: the genes and ecosystems of biology, the symbols and reference of philosophy and theology; the archetypes of betrayal and forgiveness and loving and loss that are the stuff of literature; the artifacts and lineage’s of anthropology; the materials of engineering with their limits and potentials; the logic of systems and management; the shapes and colors of music and art; the novelties and patterns of history; the elusive idea of justice under the law, the healing of medical programs and the building of dreams in our career and technical choices.  We are in community with all of these great things.  Great teaching is about knowing that community and feeling that community and sensing that community and drawing your students into it.

Everybody in academia knows what Freeman Dyson meant when he said, about the development of the nuclear weaponry that threatened to destroy the earth, “It is almost irresistible, the arrogance that comes over us when we see what we can do with our minds.”   So much arrogance that we will keep turning the crank until we destroy the earth itself.  It is only with humility, the humility that comes from being in the presence of the spirit of things  and the greatness of each other and knowing the simple quality called respect, that real knowing, teaching, and learning are possible.

Finally, if we recovered a sense of the spirit, we would recover our capacity for wonder and surprise, an absolutely essential quality in education.  I know what happens when we get surprised in an academic context.  We reach for the nearest weapon and try to kill the surprise as quickly as we can, because we are scared to death.

I will never be able to comprehend why people so devoutly believe that competition is the best way to generate new ideas, because I know from experience what happens in competition.  In competition you do not reach for a new idea, because a new idea is risky.  You don’t know how to use it.  You don’t know where it’s going to take you.  You don’t know what flank it may leave open.  In competition, you reach for an old idea that you know how to wield as a weapon, and you smite the untruth as quickly as you can.

We have flattened our landscape.  My image of this objectivist landscape in high school education is that it  becomes so lacking in variety, so utterly banal that anything that pops up and takes us by surprise is instantly defined as a threat.  Where did it come from?  It must be from underground.  It must have come from bureaucracy….certainly not from teachers. In all of the classrooms…in all of the halls…in all of the administrational offices, weren’t we once teachers?

The sacred landscape has hills and valleys, mountains and streams, forests and deserts, and is a place where surprise is our constant companion and surprise is an intellectual virtue beyond all telling.  Those are some things I think we might bring back if we pursued the themes of this discussion in our lives and education.

I want to say one final word about the journey toward recovering the sacred, about getting from here to there.  I do not believe that we can rightly ask or hopefully ask our institutions to manifest the qualities of the spirit that I have been talking about.  I don’t think institutions are well suited to carry the sacred.  I think distortion happens when the spirit gets vested in an institutional context or framework.

I think institutions have their utility.  They have jobs to do.  We all have important career decisions about whether to be inside or outside institutions and how to do that dance because we all know the power of their co-optation. Because of this topic, I have found myself thinking about social movements that have transformed the landscape of our times: the women’s movement; the black liberation movement; the movement for freedom in Eastern Europe and in South Africa.  I will not trouble you with all of the details of how movements evolve.  I just want to say a word about the starting point of social movements, as I understand it.

I believe that movements start when individuals who feel very isolated and very alone in the midst of an alien culture, come in touch with something life-giving in the midst of a death-dealing situation.  They make one of the most basic decisions a human being can make, which I have come to call the decision to live “divided no more,” the decision to no longer act differently on the outside than one knows one’s truth to be on the inside.

I call it the Rosa Parks decision, because she is emblematic for me and for many people I know of the historic potentials of a decision that can feel very lonely and very isolated.  Rosa Parks was prepared for that day on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955.  She was prepared in many ways.  She had gone to the Highlander Folk School where Martin Luther King also learned nonviolence.  She was the secretary of the NAACP in her community.

We all know that the day the moment she sat down, she had no assurances that the theory would work, that the strategy would succeed, not even assurances that people who said they were her friends would be there for her in the aftermath of that action.  It was a lonely decision made in isolation, but a decision emblematic of that being made by many other individuals in that place and time, for which she has risen to be the exemplar.  It was a decision that changed the lay and the law of the land.

I’ve often asked myself, where do people find the courage to make a decision like that when they know that the power of the institution is going to come down on their heads?  How do they find the courage to make a decision like that when they know it could easily lead to loss of status, loss of reputation, loss of income, loss of job, loss of friends, and perhaps sense of meaning?

The answer comes to me through studying the lives of the Rosa Parks and the other heroes of this world.  These are people who have come to understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment;  by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with what we know to be true on the inside.

As soon as we make that decision, amazing things happen.  For one thing, the enemy stops being the enemy.  When Rosa Parks sat down that day, it was partly an acknowledgment that by conspiring with racism, she had helped to create racism.  By conspiring with uninspirational education, we help to create death-dealing education. But by deciding to live divided no more, we help change all of that.

When the police came on the bus that day, they said to Rosa Parks, “You know if you continue to sit there, we re going to have to throw you in jail.”. Her answer is historic.  She said, “You may do that.”   An enormously polite way of saying, “What could your jail possibly mean compared to the imprisonment I’ve had myself in for the last 43 years, which I break out of today?”

I don’t know where you are on your journey.  My journey is constantly toward trying to understand what it means to live divided no more.  I think if we come out of this talk understanding that decision better, in the context of education, we will have done something well worth doing.

Some may ask what I do in my career? I am a tribal writer and lecturer, I am a part of the early American Indian Movement. I am a medical and program specialist. I work for Sunrise Assisted Living Inc., an organization dedicated to the preserving of dignity in elders with dementia.  The core values of this company are :

Encouraging Independence

Preserving Dignity

Personalizing Services

Enabling Freedom of Choice

Fostering Individuality

Protecting Privacy

Involving Family and Friends

Nurturing the Spirit

No small coincidence that these are also many of the tenets that I have spoken about in this speech on Spirit in Education. 

Where do we go from here? 

We link education with spirit through working in our communities.  Sunrise offers a wonderful opportunity where we can collaborate with education, through our Career and Technical  Medical Programs, to the lessons of life that education was at one time committed to preserve.  We keep learning alive by showing students the realities of their programs.

We inspire them to share what they are learning in a practicum with our elders, and then inspire the students again to continue their education upon high school graduation, in their studies in higher education.  Through partnerships with Community Colleges, through our educational reimbursement program, we weave a strong bond to the student. 

What results is a stronger commitment between the student and the field that they are pursuing.  Through their also earning a wage that will help them in actualizing their goals, we will see the results in the alliance between the student and the community that they will be serving upon graduation.  They are living their education.  They are becoming the students of the future in a world where it is becoming an expensive proposition.  They are succeeding. 

I challenge all of you as educators, to find your link with the student, the community, and the pulse that will bring a new life to a tired dream. You made a profound difference in my life. You have a profound affect on my spirit and together I promise you we will make the difference. In championing the human spirit…the spirit of education.

I leave you with much respect !

Susan Niya Astorino