To Teach is to Cultivate the Capacity to Dream

I believe that teaching is cultivating the capacity to dream: it is about empowering the next generation with the tools to imagine, negotiate, and build a better tomorrow. To undertake liberal education is to explore hundreds of years of struggle, missteps, successes, and renegotiations dedicated to imagining and enacting the good. And it is also to admit that the ideas that are best communicated – and not always the best ideas – may win the day.

I encourage students’ understanding of the connection between imagination and reality through grappling with the history of ideas. To speak of human rights, constitutional protections, or the rule of law is to connect contemporary struggles with Enlightenment Ideals, and I work with students to draw the explicit connection between those ideas (mere ideas!) and our experience of the world today.

As we consider texts and their arguments, we’re looking at deliberate word choice, inclusion and exclusion, and persuasive power. To better understanding the imagined yet tangible creation and re-creation of our sense of national identity, I share a version of The Gettysburg Address in the passive voice before reading Lincoln’s deliberate use of the active voice: his message of our rebirth, and his appeal to our national commitment to higher ideals. We simultaneously analyze writing well and the process of reasserting ideals as reality.

To understand dreaming and implementation, however, is also to recognize where ideas have failed, where they remain insufficient, and where they are currently harmful. I draw attention to the shortcomings in our ideas through direct community engagement, cultivation of empathy, and critical analysis. Students see the necessarily vast abstraction and representation central to any compelling story about the world. They improve their abilities to critically analyze those stories and potentially create their own. They also come to see the grave dangers involved with reckless creation of grand narratives.

Students soon see the power of dreaming through: reviewing the historical development and institutionalization of ideas; critiquing ideas implemented recklessly or with disastrous results; and considering the role of ideas in creating extraordinarily different realities around the world. Through this continuous and heightened attention to the contingent nature of the world as it is, students better understand their potential as civic actors building a better tomorrow.

To dream well is to dream carefully; to be humble about the likely veracity of our own ideas. And yet to build a better world is to dream boldly; to see the possibility for flourishing in every human and imagine a world where each person has real options. Teaching is the process of cultivating bold dreamers who have keen skills of analysis and critique, who will do better with responsible and pluralistic dreaming than generations past. Our next generation of dreamers – if we do our jobs well – will see the vast untapped potential of the world and will arrive at new ideas and institutions only through extraordinarily careful collaboration with all of those individuals affected by their imagination, advocacy, and implementation. This I believe.