Teaching Toward Freedom

Ayers opens his newest, most provocative text, Teaching Toward Freedom, with Kafka’s sentiment that literature is an “ax that breaks open the frozen sea inside us” (ix). I think you will find, as I did, that what Ayer’s borrows here foreshadows what is to come for you and I, the reader, in the next 160+ pages.

Seeming to capture the spirit of the PrESS Network, Ayers defines “freedom” as “the possibility of looking through your own eyes, of thinking, locating yourself, and, importantly, of naming the barriers to your humanity, and then joining with others to move against those obstacles” (xiii). Teaching, then, and any work in the service of humanity, is the practice of freedom, “when it is guided by an unshakable commitment to working with particular human beings to reach the full measure of their humanity, a willingness to reach toward a future fit for all” (xi).

I am confident this is our work.

I am constantly emboldened by your courage to shine forth this path toward freedom in your daily work as teachers, social workers, students, colleagues, and friends. I hope, like Solnit, Ayers inspires and reassures you on your journey. I hope his words provide the ax that provides an even more expansive fissure in the objectifying, dehumanizing, and, oftentimes, tyrannical contexts in which we find ourselves.

While Ayers will reassure us, he will also challenge us to define the tension within which we exist: between subject and object, between “free and fated” (xiv), and in “that special spot between heaven and earth” (xv). I look forward to sharing this journey with you.