ABSTRACT
In trying to answer my own students’ questions about making sense of September 11 and its aftermath, I have suggested to them a number of lessons that I believe stand out as important in a moral, social and political sense. The first thing is the way the terrible attacks reminded us of the extraordinary value of human life. The human slaughter with its incalculable consequences in personal loss, pain and suffering confronts us with the irreplaceably precious and unconditional value that inheres in each individual life. The senseless and horrifying murder underlines for us the sacred or infinite worth that belongs to each person. Such an assertion may seem banal until we remember that the firemen who raced up the stairs of the World Trade Center to save lives didn’t stop to find out who they were trying to save-whether they were Black or White, Latino or foreign born, US citizen or migrant. Nor did they check on people’s religion, sexual orientation or how wealthy or poor they were. Each life was “B’tselem Elohim”—made in the image of God. The lives were equally valuable whether they were those of wealthy stockbrokers or restaurant waiters and kitchen staff. I have pointed out that for educators there was here a powerful moral lesson; the need to help our students recognize the sacred worth of all human lives. Such a lesson, if it is to be more than sentimental cant, must however also confront the ways, in our personal behavior, institutions and culture, we so often fail to embody this truth. It means attending to the ways we diminish the value and dignity of those we designate as “other” in our world. It means confronting the ways that prejudice works to misrecognize the intrinsic humanity of others. It also means learning to understand how such
misrecognition functions to legitimate an unjust social order. So, for example, we can blame those who are poor for their economic failure because of what we assume is their laziness, indolence or sheer lack of intellectual capability. And for students engaged in such ethical and critical learning, school itself becomes a good laboratory through which to explore and understand how our society is constantly engaged in making invidious human comparisons. Such comparisons (through, for example, the use of high stakes tests) inevitably diminish the worth of some individuals while elevating the worth of others. They legitimate the hierarchies of student recognition and honor that are the moral axis of contemporary schooling. Difficult as it might be, our lessons on the value of human life require us to look critically at the way school functions as a “sorting machine”—one that celebrates and affirms some students while at the same time devaluing and marginalizing many others. And this process is deeply entangled with issues of race and money. Schools continue to be places where the experience, language and appearance of some place them in a downward spiral of low expectations and prejudicial assumptions regarding their abilities and intelligence. Public education provides us with a powerful example of our society’s schizophrenic view of human worth-at once a place that affirms everyone’s right to dignity and opportunity, and simultaneously works furiously to differentiate and rank human beings. In contrast to our culture’s pervasive focus on creating hierarchies of human worth-whether because of our looks, who we associate with, what we own, how we dress, our celebrity or lack of itSeptember 11 reminded us if only for a brief moment that each and every life must be regarded as of inestimable value.
