Carla Shalaby Quotes

requires that we call ourselves out in order to call others in.18 It requires that we be willing to confront one another, and that we be willing to listen generously when we are being confronted—letting go of our personal feelings for a commitment, instead, to the shared goal of freedom.

Our schools are designed to prepare children to take their assumed place in the social order rather than to question and challenge that order.

But school shouldn't be preparation for life. For young people, it is life. Young people in America will spend well over a full decade of their lives in school, by law. Their daily life in school is their social and professional world. It isn't just preparation for it. They demand to matter in that world, every day. These children are saying, 'We are here now, to be seen.' For the people they already are, already full human beings, exactly as human as their teachers. No more, and no less. They have things to learn as citizens, and as scholars, and as family members, and they will grow and change and develop and learn. But they are already full human beings, and none of these lessons will make them more so. They already feel, and love, and hurt. They already desire to be entertained, and engaged, and embraced. They already insist on being taken seriously, and cared for deeply. They will not be ignored, and they will not be invisible. Reflecting on the school lives of these children, recognizing the refrains in their warnings, I am reminded again of the epigraph that opens this book, from Labi Siffre's song 'Something Inside So Strong,' sung each morning by children in freedom schools across the country: 'The more you refuse to hear my voice, the louder I will sing.