The Riveting Professor Greene

I went to see Maxine Greene speak at Teachers College tonight--on the occasion of her 90th birthday. It was a thrilling thirty-five minutes, which ended delightfully, as the packed auditorium broke out with the happy birthday song. Her lecture, "Towards Pedagogy of Thought and Imagination," seemed to pull together so much of the work I have been dwelling in. Her speech moved seamlessly between poetry, fiction, and philosophy; Adrienne Rich, Camus, Melville, Freire, Fitzgerald, Morrison, Ellison, Delillo, and Ricouer were among those cited. After assailing abstraction and disinterestedness as dehumanizing modes of being ("Abstractness can cripple pity and feeling itself"; "Disinterest, a lack of recognition, can kill"), she implored us to keep questions open and alive for the sake of imaginative possibility: "The thing that keeps you going is incompleteness"; "I am what I am not yet." She enumerated three kinds of imagination: poetic, ethical, and political. (I am sure there can be more.) What I found interesting was how she tied imagination to action. She was very politically oriented, showing her Deweyan roots by this advocacy for active participation in the democratic process.

Simply put, she was captivating. I hope to see her again and again and again.