Education Stories, Inspiring or Otherwise

Samuel Freedman:

In the season of sheepskin and mortarboard, report card and honor roll, I have reached my own commencement. After four years, this is my last education column, as I move on to other journalistic endeavors.

The greatest gifts this assignment gave me were a passport to watch the magic of the classroom and the opportunity to join in a public discussion. Again and again, I saw how a school can contain the whole world. I think of the football team at Dearborn High, in a Detroit suburb with a large Arab-American community. There, several dozen Muslim players faithfully held to the Ramadan fast while making a successful run to the state playoffs in 2005. The Middle East met Middle America, and there was no clash of civilizations about it.

I think, too, about the students at Stanford who shed the cocoon of their affluent privilege to tutor the university’s custodians, many of them immigrants from Mexico, in the English language. The instruction went both ways, as the students discovered firsthand the sacrifice and integrity of those otherwise invisible men and women who collected their trash.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 4, 2008 5:33 PM
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