Martin Luther King, Jr., Teacher

It's appropriate to begin this blog on a day designated to celebrate the life of a man who spoke so eloquently and passionately about unlearning your miseducation. I was first introduced to King when I read his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in junior high school. Being that I was born into much privilege as the son of educated, White, middle-class parents I first understood it as an abstraction--a curious thing written by someone who lived far away in a distant time. I didn't realize then that the text must have read very differently to many of my classmates and friends who experienced racism as an ordinary and very real terror that shaped nearly all of their social interactions. I didn't realize that racism also shaped nearly all of my social interactions, because it put me into a privileged social space. No light bulb clicked over my oblivious head back then, and if I'm honest the light bulb was quite dull on most issues of inequity, not only racism, but also many other forms of individual and institutionalized violence: sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, heterosexism, homophobia, etc. for a long time. That is, until I began to learn from real teachers--teachers whose names never appeared on my report card.

I could stop off at many critical incidents between middle school and now that mark my growing realization that the emperors-who-ignore-racism-while-reaping-its-benefits-every-day wore no clothes, but on this day in particular one comes to mind: the day I discovered Martin Luther King's book "Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story." I read this book when working on my dissertation. Initially looking for a quote, I couldn't put it down and ignored my dissertation for the week it took me to finish. Moving, brilliant, and well-written, there is an amazing chapter in there where King explains his personal journey from Theology to Philosophy to Non-Violent Resistance. It's a wonderfully articulated reflection on our individual potential if we allow our perspectives to evolve.

It is also King's explanation of how the people around him, the great philosophers, theologians and finally the likes of Gandhi all became his teachers for unlearning his miseducation about race, society, culture, economics, and politics--an education he had been implicitly and explicitly taught from birth.

As I mentioned, I read all this while doing my dissertation study, which was largely based on research that ignored the differences that both enrich and make problematic many of our interpersonal and institutional dynamics in the United States. All this stuff on "school reform" or "teacher leadership" or "distributed leadership" and even much that presented itself as "social justice" pretended that the things that most shape our perspectives and experience did not exist, were irrelevant, or could be "controlled."  Dr. King--Noam Chomsky, Neil Postman, Alfred Korzybski, Paulo Freire, Bill Ayers, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir to name a few others--taught me to question these difference-blind "great works" I read to inform my thinking about schools, research, education and leadership, which is what I study to this day. These teachers continue to influence me, and I continue to stride toward freedom of mind and of expression.

This is, of course, not the only (and perhaps not the most important) lesson we can take from Dr. King, but if we take one central tenet of his message--to unlearn your miseducation--and use it to critically deconstruct our extant assumptions, perspectives, and ways of knowing, this great teacher will have inspired an ongoing revolution.