Love, Justice, & Privilege
If you watched the most recent royal wedding, you would have heard my husband’s grade school religion teacher, Reverend Michael Curry, offer up a pretty powerful sermon on love. Not just romantic love, the kind celebrated that day in a very British church with a very un-British homily, but transformative love. I want to quote him at length here:
Imagine our homes and families when this way of love is the way. Imagine our neighborhoods and communities when love is the way. Imagine our governments and nations when love is the way. Imagine business and commerce when this love is the way. Imagine this third old world when love is the way. No child would go to bed hungry in such a world as that. When love is the way, we will let justice roll down like a mighty stream and righteousness like an ever-flowing book.When love is the way, poverty will become history. When love is the way, the earth will be a sanctuary. When love is the way, we will lay down our swords and shields down by the riverside to study war no more. When love is the way, there’s plenty good room — plenty good room — for all of God’s children. When love is the way, we actually treat each other like we are actually family. When love is the way, we know that God is the source of us all. We are brothers and sisters, children of God. Brothers and sisters: that’s a new heaven, a new earth, a new world, a new human family. Let me tell you something: Old Solomon was right in the Old Testament — that’s fire.
I was reminded of Reverend Curry’s sermon the first day we visited Colegio La Inmaculada, one of our in-depth field experiences here in Peru. Upon arrival, we sat down with Padre Oscar, the head of school, to learn about the hallmarks of an Inmaculada education. As we were learning about the school’s mission and pastoral programs and commitment to justice, one of my Marquette students asked, How do you accomplish those lofty ideals with children of such privilege? I imagine our visit to Colegio Roosevelt a week prior was still sitting with her, a sense of incongruity between the mission of integrity and social responsibility and the campus of abundance. So she asked, How do you even do this, Padre Oscar, educate “men and women for others”? Is it even possible?
And Padre Oscar answered with a story about his own days as a student at La Inmaculada and his own time spent offering services as a young student in Pamplona Alta and its pueblos jovenes, which we had visited the week prior. He recounted one particularly meaningful relationship with an older woman who he had taught to read. He told us it was then, in those moments in Pamplona Alta with this woman who had become his friend, that he found his vocation. Not because he was so good at teaching literacy but because this woman, who lived a life so very different from his own, opened his heart to love. So yes, Padre Oscar said, there are all sorts of pastoral programs here, but the point is not the service itself. The point is not the fixing of any problem. Rather, the hope was that, through these programs that brought his students so very far from their own daily world of groomed privilege, the students would learn that they can love and in turn be loved by the poor. And in that, they are transformed. Love changes us, he said. Helping students learn to love is how they are transformed.
Here’s the thing: As educators committed to justice, we often—and absolutely must—spend most of our time thinking about the most marginalized students in our schools, those disenfranchised by race, class, language, ability, gender and sexuality. How do we make schooling just for them? Because it is decidedly unjust, and they are at the losing end of this unfairness. But I would argue that we also must think about the students at the winning end of this unfairness, those who will eventually (and let’s be honest, already do) broker power in this social hierarchy. Because unless those who are in control of this social hierarchy are in some way transformed, unless they learn to see beyond the wall that protects their swimming pools and green gardens from the precarious informal settlements on the other side, we will just keep repeating this same cycle of marginalization and oppression.
So in our week at La Inmaculada, hot on the heels of time spent in some of Lima’s most marginalized communities, our task was to consider what a just education should look like for privileged students in deeply unequal societies. We can of course identify practices and pedagogies—teaching about certain topics, engaging in service, interacting with those different from ourselves, learning to dig to the root of social problems—but in our guts, we know that none of these are really going to be effective at personal and social transformation. As you’ll see in the students’ blogs this round, they’re struggling thoughtfully with this question.
For me in my own research and teaching on justice-oriented education for the privileged, I talk a lot about partnership—are there ways we can cultivate reciprocal partnerships between youth of privilege and marginalized youth? Are there ways we can get them to be co-conspirators, collaborators for justice? How can we get them to forge relationships, authentic peer relationships, across their worlds of difference?
I still think those are important questions, but after listening to Reverend Curry & Padre Oscar, I think maybe the more pressing question is, How do we teach them to love?
