What It’s All About >>>>> Taking a Break Between Series Articles #5 and #6 for a Discussion as to the Purpose of My Striving--- and the Mission of All True Teachers >>>>> Loving Our Precious Children with Every Step We Take, Every Move We Undertake

I spend sixteen to eighteen hours every day my feet hit the ground doing everything that I can to improve the life circumstances of young people brutalized by the circumstances of history. 

 

This has been my mission for 47 years, ever since in the spring of 1971, in my sophomore year at Southern Methodist University (SMU, Dallas, Texas), I began coordinating volunteers and participating myself in tutoring students in the wretched schools of the Dallas independent School District, institutions as bad as are those of the current Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

I have in the ensuing years taught in every situation imaginable, acquired a doctorate in Taiwanese history, written eight books, and used my skills as scholar and teacher to initiate a monthly academic journal, produce a blog on which are posted 589 articles, host a weekly television show on MTN Channel 17, and speak at every chance I get, including the monthly meetings of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education.

 

But the core of what I do is to superintend two tutoring programs, the Tuesday evening program of New Salem Missionary Baptist Church;  and a daily (including Saturdays and Sundays) small-group program that first advances inevitably academically languishing Minneapolis Public Schools students to grade level in mathematics and reading;  and then launches them on a college preparatory program that now utilizes one of my two substantially complete new books, Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education covering those subjects not taught or under-taught to most students of the Minneapolis Public Schools:  economics, psychology, political science,  world religions, world history, United States history, African American history, world literature, English usage, fine arts, mathematics, biology, chemistry, and physics.  

 

And as many snippets indicate, including the ongoing 14-article series amidst which this article is interposed, I am now in the process of wrapping up my substantially complete investigation into the inner workings of the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Understanding the Minneapolis Public Schools:  Current Condition, Future Prospect.

 

Mine is the life commitment of the great revolutionaries:    Mohandas K. Gandhi, Mao Zedong, Gloria Steinhem, Malcolm X, and---  especially---  Saul Alinsky (he who had no patience with impractical revolutionary banter and was all about every day, courageous, persistent, effective action.)

 

Why do I commit this amount of time in the service of the K-12 Revolution?

 

Kathy Saltzman, the erstwhile head of the Minnesota chapter of Michelle Rhee’s now largely moribund StudentsFirst organization twice attended the annual banquet of the New Salem Educational Initiative, blown away with student demonstrations of knowledge, skill, and dramatic talent.  She also observed my interactions with my students and families and was moved to say,

 

“Gary, wow, you are so sweet and gentle with your students, and they and their families so clearly adore you---  and you clearly adore them.  And yet you speak truth to power like no one I’ve ever seen.”

 

“Kathy, the difference is that I love children and young people.  It’s adults whom I don’t like very much.”

 

Children burst into the world as bundles of energy, all believing that they are playing on the same field of opportunity.  This is the way they enter kindergarten, first grade, and (most of the time) second grade.  But from third grade forward, the world becomes heavy for children who have been shoved by the forces of history---  beyond slavery (that should have ended in 1865) let us emphasize Jim Crow in the South, restricted housing covenants in the North, white and black middle class flight from the urban core, lousy systems of public education of which the district of the Minneapolis Public Schools is just one iteration, and the contemporary slavery of penal institutions---  into lives oft-proscribed, cut off before they begin, lost to the streets or on a fast track to prison.

 

Only the overhaul of K-12 education can chart a different course for the River of History.

 

That is why I do what I do.

 

I love children with all of my soul.  

 

With each child who comes to me, I know that I am the difference between life and death. 

 

That is the case for all true teachers. 

 

Lives can either end on mean streets or in institutions of involuntary servitude that express the historical ideals of slavery, Jim Crow, sharecropping, and redlined residential areas.  I can either point that child on a course that appreciates life in all of its beauty:  nature, art, music, drama, literature, mathematics, and science;  or I can shirk my duty and send these precious Specimens of Divinity tumbling into Terrestrial Hell.

 

I love my son, Ryan Davison-Reed, and my Partner in Life, Barbara Reed, with boundless fervor and ferocity.  Just a slim notch below those precious tethers to my soul are those who have almost as great a claim on my love and time and attention:  my students, young people throughout Minneapolis but especially in North Minneapolis, their families, and all of those people to whom the weight of history has been borne heavily.

 

It takes a village, but where are the villagers?

 

Where are those teachers and other adults who will love all children as if they are their own?

 

They exist, but they are too few.

 

We must have more villagers.

 

The precious children of the village await the life denied to their ancestors, the earthly sojourn of cultural enrichment, civic participation, and professional satisfaction that will be theirs now and for all future generations.