I frequently enjoy reflecting on school leadership with friends who serve as school leaders. Recently, I had occasion to speak with a friend who is a Montessori school head about the demands of our roles as leaders, the balance of classroom life, teachers-students-parents, governance, vision and managing the school’s many constituents. We spoke just prior to Thanksgiving to postpone once again getting together owing to the hectic pace of work. Somewhere in the midst of venting about job stress our focus shifted in our mutual desire to buoy each other and we began affirming and re-affirming the underlying importance and value of the work we do in the lives of children. And so it is that hope for the possibilities of our daily work once more usurped our contemplation of the many obstacles we confront. I left the conversation feeling better, more energized and ready to carry on – hopeful.
When hope leaches out of education, it is important to remind ourselves that education is premised on hope and that educators need to work hard to reveal opportunities to promote hope, no matter what the obstacles may be. Hope, after all, safeguards us against falling into indifference in the face of tough going, which is why teachers cannot responsibly abandon it in their work in schools. They not only need to take hope seriously and seek to personify it in their actions, they must also find ways of nurturing it among students and colleagues - especially now given that our worlds, privately, nationally and globally, are complicated by persistent uncertainty. To teach how to live with uncertainty, and yet without being thwarted by indecision, is one of the things a good education offers. It recognizes popular knowledge and cultural content as points of departure for the knowledge that learners and hopeful ideas create of the world. Hope is a vital spiritual energy and a remedy for lassitude and apathy. Education encourages hope, encourages feeling competent - able to act, able to change things, or even to create them. It is powerful to learn that today you can begin to do something you could not do yesterday.
Being hopeful also involves the notion that something good, which does not presently apply to our world, is still conceivable. Therefore, hope has a creative role in the development of imaginative solutions to ostensibly insurmountable difficulties. In this regard, hope is about success rather than failure. It envisions potentials and opportunities not yet present; and, more than this, it anticipates and shapes the terrain for something new.
I love that my friends and colleagues are willing to offer me hope always – hope that I can make a difference; hope that there is value in all we do; hope that we can achieve the impossible if we are willing to attempt the absurd – together.
“Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all.” Emily Dickinson
