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On one of our final days in Cusco, we visited a public school in the area. At the school, it was explained to us that a huge school priority is to incite cultural pride in the students. Many of the students are ashamed of their indigenous ancestry because it means discrimination against them for the rest of their lives. We were told that, no matter how educated these students become or how many languages they learn, they will always be more discriminated against than their white counterparts. This statement struck a chord in me, as it did with the other people in my group, I believe. It struck me because of 1) the seemingly final nature of it and 2) the direct parallels with discrimination against minority students in the United States.
Later on in seminar, we spoke about what we had heard at the school. It was brought up that, after visiting the school, it became apparent that teachers of students who will always be discriminated against need to keep their expectations for those students’ futures real. What I brought up in response, but had a hard time putting into the right words, is that, although realistic expectations are important, this mentality often times leads teachers to become a part of the system that is oppressing the students for whom they fight so hard. I still didn’t know exactly what I was trying to say in that moment, until I read the final readings for this class. The Duncan-Andrade article, “Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete,” set off a lightbulb in my head. Duncan-Andrade put into words exactly what I was trying to say and exactly how I felt after leaving that school in Cusco. He talks about multiple kinds of hope in education; what I meant to say that day in Cusco is that, as educators, it is imperative that we empower our students with the right kind of hope: a hope that is realistic yet helps them to rise above and dismantle the oppressive system, not a hope that helps us become a part of that system.
Duncan-Andrade brings up three types of detrimental hopes: “hokey hope, mythical hope, and hope deferred.” “Hokey hope” is the kind hope that teachers give their students when they present them with the “bootstrap theory.” This theory is that anyone can get ahead if they work hard enough, and it completely ignores political and socioeconomic systems that oppress minorities. “Mythical hope” is the post-Obama administration, racism-is-dead, philosophy that once again undermines the struggles and oppression that people deal with every day. The final hope, “hope deferred,” I believe is the most common from what I have seen amongst teachers. It’s a belief that the system is unjust but that it is way too far out of teachers’ control to help students who are oppressed by this system. In my own understanding, and from what I saw in Cusco, when teachers at the school were talking about keeping their expectations real, they meant avoiding filling students’ heads with these kinds of hope. Hokey hope and mythical hope completely undermine what students who are discriminated against and whose families are discriminated against are going through. Teachers who teach these kinds of hopes ignore the reality of their students’ circumstances, and therefore provide false hope.
I think the error that many people in the field of education make is that, in order to avoid filling students with these kinds of false hope, they don’t include hope in the classroom environment at all. Duncan-Andrade provided me with a term for the kind of hope we should keep in our classrooms: critical hope. As he puts it, critical hope “demands a committed and active struggle against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides of wealth inequality, group xenophobia, and personal despair.” It is providing students with tools to act upon injustice, not to ignore reality. It is what I like to think of as an active hope, not a dreamy hope. I saw a lot of this kind of hope promoted in the schools we saw in Peru. We saw so many schools that were dedicated to teaching their students about their own unalienable human rights. In the Andes in particular, we saw schools that were attempting to close the gender gap in education and promote higher education for all. The school in Cusco wanted to fill their students with cultural pride so that instead of leaving, they grew up to make their own community a better place. This, I believe, is critical hope. It is hope for a better future someday, but it also the acknowledgement that making a better future someday begins today with solid action.
So going back to that day in seminar, here is what I would have said: yes, it is important to keep our expectations for our students and their circumstances real. We cannot fill them with hokey hope or hope that the discrimination against them will magically disappear once they graduate. However, if we as educators give up on our students’ futures, we are oppressing them as much the rest of the world is. We still need to fill them with hope, a hope that empowers them and enables us to stand with them in solidarity. Teachers need to provide a critical hope that helps students to flourish, even in the worst of circumstances. Duncan-Andrade talks about the pain that students feel and about not ignoring it, but acknowledging it as necessary to grow and to change the world as it is today. This what I saw in Peru and what I hope to take with me to Milwaukee, a place where so many students are told that they will not succeed by the very people whose job it is to help them. I wish to bring critical hope to my classroom so that my students are proud of who they are and know that they can make a concrete change for the better. This is what I would have said.