Teaching Freire and CUNY Open Admissions

"Open admission—college for anyone who wants it—has long seemed to many educators the natural extension of the American ideal of equal opportunity for all"

—Fred Hechinger, "The Problem of Open Admission to College"

"Our next subject is equity and the equitable … and their respective relations to justice and the just … [The] equitable is just, but not the legally just but a correction of legal justice … And this is the nature of the equitable, a correction of law where it is defective."

—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

At LaGuardia Community College of the City University of New York (CUNY), we are lucky to have two things: the most ethnically and linguistically diverse group of students in the United States, and the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, an archive of the mayoral papers of every New York City mayor beginning with Fiorello LaGuardia. Faculty from a variety of disciplines use the archive to teach New York City issues from the history of graffiti or community gardens, to the garbage strikes of the 1970s or the development of the Meals on Wheels program. A wealth of personal letters, recorded speeches, letters of complaint, memos, photographs, and artifacts are available to anyone who wishes to use them. This archive is where I first came across the compelling list of "Eighteen Demands" for open admission to City College of New York made by Black and Puerto Rican students in 1969. I have been teaching Paulo Freire's chapter "The Banking Concept of Education"¹ to my ENG 101 composition students for years, but I hoped supplementing Freire's ideas with this document and some further history of open admissions would provide new insights into what Freire meant by "the scope of action allowed to students."

Previously, teaching Freire had been enlightening to students, but we rarely got past talking about personal bad experiences with school. Students would recount stories of bad, sometimes abusive, teachers who cut down students' own patterns of thought and response. They were often shocked that one could conceive of education in any way other than to treat students as "empty 'containers' waiting to be 'filled' by the teacher." Our conversations allowed students, often for the first time, to dream about what a school could be and to think about what they really wanted to learn for themselves. It opened up an opportunity to imagine taking control of their own educational goals beyond financial gain. But I often felt we were not making the connection to the social and political ramifications of education systems and policies. In the end, adding the archival resource on open admissions inspired more concrete and wide-ranging questions and helped move the discussion beyond the personal into the social.

Beginning with Freire

Beginning with students' personal experience still felt useful as a way into this discourse, so I began by having them write about their previous education in terms of key ideas from Freire. I asked them to quote at least one key idea from Freire and pair it with an experience—positive or negative—that served as an example of the concept. As usual, many students discussed how much of their previous education had served only to "obviate thinking," to stop them from expressing themselves or asking necessary questions. One student, Karen, a young woman who had emigrated from Columbia five years earlier, described a particularly oppressive teacher who made her write and rewrite her papers until not only her English grammar, but also her ideas, matched perfectly the ideals of the teacher. She put it well: "her personality threatened to eclipse my own." Writing about past educational experiences seemed cathartic to the students. Story after story indicated students were realizing as they wrote how often they had simply been told what to do and followed orders—or did not to their own academic peril. One student wrote, "I think this is why I never cared to do so good in school. I am in nature a resistant person. I don't like to do what I'm told. I have my own ideas." He went on to...