Maxine Greene, Teacher and Educational Theorist, Dies at 96 (NYTimes - June 4, 2014) #Harlem Education News: Teachers College, Columbia University, Barnard College EXCERPT: Maxine Greene, a teacher and education theorist who promoted the arts as a fundamental learning tool and in nearly 50 years at Teachers College, Columbia University, became its resident Pied Piper, known for her persuasive scholarship, her vivid writing and her imbuing teaching with a spirit of endless adventure, died on May 29 at her home in Manhattan. She was 96. “With the passing of Maxine Greene, Teachers College has lost its brilliant philosopher queen,” the president of the college, Susan Fuhrman, said in a statement. Dr. Greene was a very public intellectual, the personification of ideas in the world. In addition to her post at Teachers College —she was William F. Russell Professor Emerita in the Foundations of Education and taught as recently as this spring — she was philosopher-in-residence at the Lincoln Center Institute, the educational arm of the performing arts center. Her apartment on Fifth Avenue, not far from the Guggenheim and Metropolitan museums, was a salon welcoming of students, current and former, and reflective of a formidable sphere of influence that included the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire; Rika Burnham, head of education at the Frick Collection; the playwright and performer Anna Deavere Smith; the writer Frank McCourt; and the educator and activist Bill Ayers. Dr. Greene was a prolific writer and lecturer on topics in education like multiculturalism and the power of imagination, and she was often cited as an intellectual descendant of the progressive thinker John Dewey. An opponent of stringent academic standards as measured by testing and other classroom accountability theories, she extolled the virtues of the Thoreauvian concept she called “wide-awakeness,” though she was undeterred by the pessimism of Thoreau, who asserted that “the millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred million to a poetic or divine life.” Dr. Greene believed that creative thinking and robust imagining were the keys not just to an individual’s lifelong learning but to the flourishing of a democratic society. She espoused the view that students could be taught and encouraged to engage the world not just as it is but as it might otherwise be. “I am suggesting that, for too many individuals in modern society, there is a feeling of being dominated, and that feelings of powerlessness are almost inescapable,” Dr. Greene wrote in a 1978 essay, “Wide-Awakeness and the Moral Life.” “I am also suggesting that such feelings can to a large degree be overcome through conscious endeavor on the part of individuals to keep themselves awake, to think about their condition in the world, to inquire into the forces that appear to dominate them, to interpret the experiences they are having day by day. Only as they learn to make sense of what is happening, can they feel themselves to be autonomous. Only then can they develop the sense of agency required for living a moral life.”
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 14:14:46 +0000