ABSTRACT
As preparation for the topic of this volume and the conference on which it is based, I reflected on the role of the arts in my own development. For the first 3 years of high school—longer ago than I care to remember— I wanted to study mathematics. For most of my childhood and adolescence, we lived in public housing on the south and west sides of Chicago. I wanted to study mathematics, I think, because my father loved mathematics and often said that everything in the world is mathematical. In my junior year, our trigonometry teacher sent a group of us to the Illinois Institute of Technology for an advanced Saturday class. There was no preparation for either the cognitive demands of the class or its social demands. I had never been on a college campus before. We were the only African American faces in a huge college lecture room. When the professor went to the board and began to speak, as far as I was concerned he could have been speaking Greek—indeed, some of the symbols he wrote were Greek and totally foreign to me. I had no mentors or intermediaries who could represent or help me understand what was happening and how unprepared I felt, even though I had been an honor student in mathematics and all my other classes at Crane High School in Chicago. Developmentally naïve, I then interpreted that experience as signally that I could not possibly study advanced mathematics. Then, in my senior year, I had a cathartic experience. My senior English teacher—Reverend Roy Morrison, whom I will never forget— made literature come alive for me and somehow enchanted me with the autobiography of Albert Schweitzer, who lived during the same time as Jean Piaget . Although in theory quite distinct from my experiences growing up in public housing on the west side of Chicago, somehow Schweitzer—through the scaffolding provided by Reverend Morrison— transported me into a time and place that I had never directly experienced in my life. That hermeneutical experience opened a vision of possibility for my future life.
