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Foreword by Patricia F. Carini
"Lillian Weber’s work was original, ground-breaking, and passionate. She wrote for teachers who were working against the grain. For this reason her work resonates in new and surprising ways for contemporary readers. Her message continues to command attention and demand a response."
—William Ayers,
The University of Illinois at Chicago
"It is love that called Lillian to her task.... In Lillian, love wasn’t a throbbing heart or a soulful imploring—love was a call to action. It was doing the work that needs doing and doing it now. . . . It was doing that work in the world without flinching from the realities and circumstances, some of them devastating, in which children and families and schools find themselves in a society that overvalues and inequitably distributes material resources—and has lost sight of human ‘goods.’ That is the weighty legacy Lillian leaves us in these papers—a legacy of struggle and love enacted daily and without faltering."
—From the Foreword
This book is a forward-looking, rather than retrospective, collection of the influential writings of Lillian Weber. The essays—many published here for the first time—represent the mature thinking of a progressive educator who, after 20 years of teaching young children, initiated dramatic changes in the public schools of New York City.
This important text:
• Reclaims the importance of teachers being seen—by themselves and by others—as intelligent, capable, central, and committed to children’s growth.
• Confronts the issue of equity for minority students and shows how it can be interpreted in the approach both to curriculum and to the school’s role in the community.
• Probes the meaning of educating all children and of what education should be in a democracy.
• Looks at the school, teachers, parents, and community as elements of the ecology of the child’s educative experience.
• Offers an original approach to the question of morality in education.
