Left Field? Left Back? Left Out? What’s “Left” in Public Education?

Working teachers from public secondary schools in the NY metropolitan area discuss what it means to have a left pedagogy and curriculum and the possibilities for encouraging organic intellectuals who can be leaders in movements for social change. Speakers view their work within the context of concepts developed by Gramsci, hegemony and organic intellectual. Schools are dialectical institutions designed to replicate capitalist social inequality, but which create space for the emergence of indigenous working-class intellectuals with ties to oppressed communities. Alan Singer provides an overview of public education today. Pablo Muriel discusses working with high school students from the Bronx who fought against the closing of their school and are now involved as social change activists. Justin Williams teaches in a suburban minority community. For Justin, teaching as a leftist means providing classroom experiences that force students to not only gain an understanding of the power structures that have been influencing their lives but to begin to think critically about them. Being a leftist educator means that whatever the standard curriculum material or the skill components of the lesson, you are always teaching for social justice. Atif Khalil is a Pakistani American from the suburbs. Because of his left perspective he chose to teach social studies in inner-city New York City communities where his students are largely either immigrants or the children of immigrants.