ABSTRACT
The structure of school, the expectations, and the dull repetitiveness of regular routines, traditions, and assumptions will have accomplished something sinister. All students, from preschool through adult education, bring powerful, propulsive, and expansive questions with them each day into every classroom. Rather, democracy, like education, is an aspiration to be continually nourished, engaged, and exercised, a dynamic, expansive experiment that must be achieved over and over again by every individual and each successive generation if it is to live at all. A commitment to the visibility of students as persons requires a radical reversal. Teachers, whatever else they do, must become students of their students. The student becomes a source of knowledge, information, and energy; actor, speaker, creator, constructor, thinker, doer—a teacher as well as a learner. Teachers must commit to know themselves as they, too, change and grow.
