ABSTRACT
Safe harbors are places where people anchor themselves in what is comfortable and secure, in a fixed sense of who they are, either as members of the dominant culture or as the “Other” given a space at the margins. In order to grow and develop, to become what they are not yet, to adapt to a rapidlychanging world, and to realize their fuller possibilities, Melville suggests that people need to be a bit weary of comfort spaces and need to be prepared to leave safe harbors and venture out. New Bedford, at best, is a point of departure, not a final destination. It only exists in relation to the journey out. It is the journey out that thus constitutes New Bedford as a temporary resting point, a way station, from which one begins another journey. Melville was one of America’s early progressives, at least in the sense that I mean to use that term. He is committed to the idea that American democracy is an unfinished project, and that our basic orientation in both education and in public life should be toward change, and more specifically toward the ongoing reconstruction of self and public life to advance democratic values and ways of living and relating to one another in the face of anti-democratic interests who would call us back to a romanticized image of safe harbors. Melville calls on us to live “landless” and “shoreless,” to continuously journey out from safe harbors upon a voyage that is open, and for which there can be no final destination or end point. Progressive education, like progressive cultural politics, must be reconstructive. They must call upon people to “think” the world in new ways, to leave the comfort and safety of what they think they know to be true about the world, to imagine what could be, to act and relate in new ways.
