Introduction

It was then clear to us that morning, listening to her, that the past does not hold her attention for long. It is the future that draws her, the future that calls to her. She is rewriting, she tells us, her first book, The Public School and the Private Vision (and asked me not to include discussion of the original version in this book). She continues a rigorous schedule of public speeches and professional obligations, including teaching. It is late morning now, and she has been speaking for an hour. As she draws near to what feels like the end of the speech, she pauses and looks at us. ‘Who am I?’ she poses, partly to us, partly to herself. She answers: ‘I am who I am not yet.’ ‘Not yet’…the phrase still hangs in the air around me. Maxine Greene is…not yet. Her own sense of incompletion, of what is not yet but can be, inspires us to work for a future we can only imagine now. You will see that inspiration at work in the essays collected here.