Public Education Research Paper

Public education is a political battlefield on which both teachers and children are at risk, especially children who live on the margins of our society. As I try to understand how teachers can protect their own integrity amid these dangers—so they can help protect the integrity of children, and of education itself—I return time and again to the memoirs of a man who grew up in Harlem during the 1920's and 30's.
He writes about the hardships of being a child in that time and place, about the poverty and despair that surrounded his young life, about the price that he and his community paid for the racism of American society. But he also writes about sources of light that illumined his future in the midst of what he calls "dark times". Several