Loewen: Chapter 12

What Do We Know of the World First-Hand?

I was born and raised in central Illinois.  I was lucky to be the third generation of women to have graduated from college, but for all of us it had been a financial struggle.  I married, moved across the country, and worked to put my spouse through graduate school so that we would have an income and medical insurance.  As an equal partner, I chose to raise children as a stay-at-home parent and to move back to Illinois to take care of aging parents on both sides of our family.  

Within days of moving into my husband's childhood home, I experienced first-hand harassment and discrimination as the general contractor on the major remodel of our historic home. Battling bigots who questioned our right to purchase a long-empty home as "out-of-towners" to city employees who didn't want to accept work orders from a woman.  It was a disheartening and frightening time with a small child at home and daily threats to our safety and to our workers.

As Loewen says, "power elite theories seem to explain everything but may explain nothing," and I agree with him that by giving into such theories one can easily absolve ourselves from the responsibility of changing what we see as wrong.

So when I was asked in a coffee house conversation, what I thought about a letter a mother had written to the local paper asking for help - it struck me that my experiences (especially in the coffee house) should be used to advocate for others.  I had spent a lifetime straddling two worlds - one in which (Loewen) "members of the elite came to think that their privilege was historically justified and earned" to another marked by less-than-equal opportunities and social inequality.  Below is the opinion-editorial piece I wrote for the local paper.  Thus, began my last ten years of public service.

I think it is particularly important for social studies educators to be involved in serving their community through public service* and/or to have their students participate in projects that shape their standards of reality, their self-identity, and their political belongingness.  As C. Wright Mill's wrote in his 1956 book The Power Elite:

The knowledgeable man in the genuine public is able to turn his personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for his community and his community's relevance for them. He understands that what he thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society.

*Stay informed on the political issues facing education:

 http://dianeravitch.net/2012/10/25/teachers-running-for-office-in-ohio/