Loving/Learning

A speech delivered at Questions from the Intersection of Love, Justice and Education, Chicago Curriculum Studies Student Symposium, February 22, 2013

I think that love and education almost all the time go perfectly together. I think that that is the problem with the actual schools. Not all the time do teachers have love for their students. They sometimes think it is just a job, and they really don’t think that love and education go well together. They just think a school is about education: you just have to get *things* done!

This is a story I heard on Radiolab about love and education because it is about a woman Annie Druyan who fell in love with a man Carl Sagan when they were working on this space project so that maybe aliens in millions of years could open it up and hear all the sounds of earth. They are learning about space and how fast the space capsule could travel and how long it would last before it disintegrated in space. They are trying to capture beautiful sounds that happen on earth. So sometimes love and education have to go together for a relationship to go well. Two days after the spacecraft was launched, they announced that they were getting married.

Not all education love has to do with romantic love. So here are a few examples of not-romantic love that has to do with education. I am going to give you an example of when I loved my teacher and of when I loved what I was learning.

I fell in love with acting. My dad is an actor, and my mom was an actress in college, and she still goes to a lot of theater with me. Acting helps you learn to express your feelings in a good way and not just go crazy over everything. You are helping the playwright tell a story. Stories are important because almost everything about learning tells a story. History tells a story about the past. Literature tells stories about the past, present, and future. Sometimes they are fake; sometimes they are real. They are both good. Science tells a story if you do an experiment, and that will tell the story of what happens to the chemical or something. Even when you play a game, it tells you a story because it has a beginning, a middle, and an end, just like a book.

One of the teachers that I very much love asked me to do this speech. She has helped me learn a lot about art. When I was just a tiny little girl, when I was only about 2 or 3, we went to the Art Institute and we met her there. I was looking at a painting, and I was telling her what I thought about it, and then she said, “Why don’t you come to the class?” Then I came to the class. And all the classes were so fun because my teacher Miss Rachel helped me understand all the different kinds of artwork and how the artists expressed their feelings. There was this one painting that was just a straight I-like canvas, and it had red and blue, and it was by Barnett Newman. I told Miss Rachel it reminds me of feelings. And she said, “What kind of feelings?,” and I said, “It reminds me of when you feel sad that someone is leaving but you also feel happy that they are happy that they get to go and explore what else there is.” The love in this story is that she didn’t just say, “Everybody, can you say Barnett Newman?” And then everybody went, “Barnett Newman!” No! She listened to everybody’s questions, and she understood what the children were saying, and she took our ideas seriously.

John Dewey had an idea of a Utopian school where they get to learn what they want to learn, get to read books they want to read. They get to learn by doing things. So if they want to learn to play violin, they play violin with other people who already know. I like...