ABSTRACT
In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the protagonist remembers a statue on the campus of the college he attended (and from which the duplicitous Dr. Bledsoe expels him). The bronze, bird-soiled statue is of the Founder of the college, “his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in the hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding.”1 Recall, too, that the protagonist throughout the novel is “invisible,” as he puts it, “simply because people refuse to see me,” because of a “peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality.”2 I contend that schooling as most of our students experience it is a lowering of a veil, that a prevailing conception of education evident in schools and society constructs a particular set of “inner eyes” through which they see themselves and the students they teach.
