Claims that the possibility of freedom is an aspect of one's individuality, and this possibility must be actualized through circumstances and conscious involvement with other human beings. Argues education should open spaces to enable poor and minority children to imagine new possibilities for themselves. (NH)

Women who are able to acknowledge their distinctive perceptions and to relate them to their lives are the ones most likely to expose the oppressiveness of a power-driven society. Nathaniel Hawthorne's fictional character, Hester Prynne ("The Scarlet Letter") illustrates a crucial theme: a woman's faculty for critical awareness and her ability to…

The arts and the cultivation of informed awareness should play a more central role in classroom life than they do, and student teachers should be empowered to make this, to some degree, possible. Student teachers have to be able to spend time thinking through what a rational explanation actually means, even as they have to understand what…

Discusses the "American jeremiad"--a pervasive ideological theme portraying a national mission and our failures in achieving it--and the influence of this ideology on elementary and secondary education. (MCG)