The comprehensive demand on students and teachers alike is this: You must change. You are living in the world as it is, of course, but right next to the world-as-such lie worlds that could be or should be but are not yet. We are products of this world, but as we reach toward a possible world, or as we work to create a more joyful and just, peaceful and loving world right here, we must simultaneously change ourselves.
Change yourself, change the world; change yourself in order to change the world; change yourself to be worthy of the advancing world. (Ayers, “I Shall Create!” in Teaching When the World is on Fire, p. 14)
Now seems like a good time to revisit Lisa Delpit’s 2019 essay collection Teaching When the World is on Fire. Reading Bill Ayers’s opening essay, “I Shall Create!” felt nourished—a call to revisit my sense of purpose as an educator.