Zora Neale Hurston, the black writer and anthropologist, liked to tell a story about how she was arrested for crossing against a red light. But, she laughed, she had gotten off. “I told the policeman,” she would say, “that I had seen white folks pass on the green and so assumed the red light was for me.” That story has always held a particular appeal to me, since my father was color blind and could not tell red from green. He knew them apart in traffic lights, he once told me, only because one was always on top and the other on bottom. signs, particularly: Which are on top and which on bottom; which command you to stop, and which invite you to proceed, and how that might differ, depending who “you” are. After all, schools, whatever else they do, help establish and transmit our society’s cultural signals, those determinative red and green lights. Indeed, one way of understanding the curriculum is as an elaborate set of signals directing students onto the various tracks they will likely follow throughout their lives. However that might be, it is certainly true that educational institutions always seem to be caught between two prepositions, “in” and “to.” Part of our mission is to instruct students in various disciplines, in history, in literature, in physics. But at the same time, we are expected to orient students to the world outside the classroom, to its creation and recreation in the work they will perform and the ideas they will evolve. find a tension in these prepositions between the voices of the past and the visions of the future. The dilemma may seem familiar, yet another chapter in the honored debate between the Ancients and the Moderns, between those who say “set the students’ eyes firmly upon the ‘monuments of unaging intellect,’ “ and those who say “educere, lead them forth, help them dream, let their ‘thought be mother to the deed.’ ”
The Young-New as a Space of Occurrence in the “World” by V. Bibikhin