Fifteen Eighty Four

To the memory of Walter Roberts III (1959–2021)

τὸ γάρ τοι θάνατον δεδιέναι, ὦ ἄνδρες,                                             To fear death, gentlemen,

οὐδὲν ἄλλο ἐστὶν ἢ δοκεῖν σοφὸν εἶναι μὴ ὄντα:                               is no other than to think oneself wise

when one was not

δοκεῖν γὰρ εἰδέναι ἐστὶν ἃ οὐκ οἶδεν.                                                It is to think one knows when one

does not.

—Plato, Apology 29a

I choose this passage from Plato’s Apology as a tribute to my friend and mentor, Walter Roberts III. Walter died quite suddenly while we were working on this handbook and I wanted to find some way to honor his extraordinary life. A teacher of ancient Greek and Latin, Walter’s idealism stood out in what he regarded as the cynical, sterile climate of academia. Considered by some to be a demanding taskmaster in the classroom, I prefer to think of Walter as a lover of lost causes, who sought to live and teach without compromise. Walter’s modus operandi was to barrel ahead with a booming voice and tireless personality, oblivious to comfort or convention. He was skeptical of doing anything that didn’t require one’s full attention, even devotion – his insistence that I start my philosophical studies with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason reflects this exacting yet hopeful spirit. Of course, Walter didn’t just devote himself to a life of the mind. He spent many of his summers biking in Glacier National Park and he once hitchhiked from Detroit to Alaska to personally witness its natural beauty. While Walter never realized his dream of establishing a Latin and Greek Academy for students in Detroit – for which he left a tenure track position at University of Vermont – he refused to let this setback prevent him from sharing his passion for Classics with the general public. His YouTube site, which “supports students and teachers of Ancient Greek and Latin by offering tutorial videos presenting ‘guided translations’ of original texts” is still accessible today: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzzOk5wVFEtAq2agtTSUqlQ.

Walter embodied the same careful and discerning approach to the past that we hope you will find in the chapters of Part I: Traditions in Ethics and Education. He believed that to better understand and address problems in the present we – and not just academics, but all concerned citizens – should first critically engage with our rich and troubled history. He dedicated his life to this aim without concern for material wealth or professional recognition. Walter contentedly lived out the last several years of his life in a small house in Detroit with few possessions besides his many shelves of books and his trusted basset companion, Bo. Recalling Socrates’ renowned equanimity in the face of his own death felt to me like a fitting way to remember Walter who lived life uncompromisingly, and yet, by all appearances, wasn’t afraid to leave the world when it was his time to go.

I encountered Dr. Lemos during my Ph.D. academic journey when I struggled to reconcile religious faith, ethics, and the salience of my global South background with analytic philosophy. His scholarship, teaching practice, and personable nature were a potent elixir of transcendence (through Kant’s metaphysics) and apprehending universality beyond the Global North’s circumscribed epistemic schemas (studying Butler’s ethical theory) and towards finding intellectual freedom. Angela Davis’s Freedom is a Constant Struggle is a refrain articulating these universal freedom notes as a quest.

Apprehending and sustaining the liberty of mind and body is one that, remarkably, people of the Global South,  but not exclusively, have to undertake. Bringing ethical theory to bear, particularly normative, is one precondition of liberation.

I remember the day that I walked into the reception area of the philosophy department at the University of Miami. I clutched the acceptance letter nervously to verify my right to be there. A gray-haired man, so tall that I had to adjust my eyes upward, strolled languidly towards me. Within moments, his gravelly voice and deep Southern accent, which suggested that laughter was an easy transition, hinted at the good humor of his expression and communication.

When I first met Dr. Lemos in 1996, he had spent nearly forty years at the institution, being promoted from lecturer to full professor, including being department chairperson. He would retire in 1999, three years later. In the interim, I had the great privilege of being his student for multiple classes, including seminars on Immanuel Kant, philosophical theology, political philosophy, and ethics.

There were no apparent commonalities. We were different in every seeming way. I was a Black Jamaican/American female in her early thirties, and he was a white male academic from Alabama on the verge of retirement. Yet, in one course after another, he assisted in the honing of systematic conceptual analysis of analytic philosophy. I eagerly studied his evaluations of my course papers, on which there was copious feedback. In lectures, he modeled, to the point of almost tedium, the simple logic and clarity of well-formed arguments that challenged dogma and established theories of value. As important was that he inquired about the well being of my small family  regularly and shared about his own.

By the time I was his student, he had reached comfortable philosophical positions about the existence of God and the axioms of a coherent theory of value.  On the former, he argued for a firm reasoning demarcation between faith and philosophy. However, he maintained that a strong philosophical case could be made for some of the undergirding premises of proofs for the existence of God. But it was his stalwart promotion of Joseph Butler that was a game changer for me. Butler’s belief in the inherent value of human beings was paired with his belief that this universality was the organizing principle of the human condition. It was the task of ethics to find it wherever it might be. Butler confirmed for me what I, as a neophyte philosopher, believed intuitively then. There was epistemic and moral universality across cultures and nations. Moral relativism was not the only moral stance that was culturally relevant. It was an overt rejection of epistemic and axiological colonialism.

This task is one that Angela Davis embodies in her quest to end oppression in every and any form against Black and brown people. It is a cry for freedom to exemplify these moral frameworks in any culturally embodied form.

The study of ethics began for me as an intense interest in the unethical. I arrived to graduate school, a second time, angry and searching, and frankly—mad as hell. I was the then-wife of an Iraq War veteran who had recently returned from a tour of service overseas. I was a mom to two small children. I had recently spent a year listening to Aaron Brown’s nightly broadcast on CNN and sitting by the phone in anticipation of the worst news. At that moment, America was unrecognizable to me. Years later I wrote in my dissertation that my life had begun to feel like the images I saw on the news during hurricane Katrina—citizens on roof tops begging for help, pleading for someone to come rescue them. I simply could not make sense of life at this moment. I was incredibly naïve to injustice in all its many forms and possessed an embarrassingly simple understanding of America. But then, by chance, I ran into a flyer advertising a graduate-level course titled “Social Justice Education and the Iraq War.” This course offered me an entry point to understand my lived experience—finally, someone or something could help me make sense of life.    

The professor was completely captivating with a masterful ability to weave in and out of history and philosophy and political theory. He could situate current events within broad cultural contexts, and he taught us to always return to the text and the delicately placed words of an argument. He butchered every sentence I ever wrote and then at the end would write long paragraphs of praise about what was insightful and how this work mattered. He pointed me down rabbit holes rather than away from them. He made us read portions of our papers aloud on due dates and offered real-time commentary, and he always cheered for a pithy title that captured the aim of the paper. He recommended book after book and was always willing to talk about ideas. He listened intently to student comments in the classroom. You could see him wince or smile as students stumbled about their analyses. His office door was always wide- open and he went to the office, not zoom,on every day. He told stories of his own education and life as a high school civics teacher at boarding schools and on aircraft carriers. He fostered my obsession with the etymology of words and the beauty of exacting language. I’d later find out he had a dictionary stand, like a lecture podium, in his house with a magnifying glass and gallery light beaming down on the words. I still hope to have one of those one day.

During this time, I stumbled upon a little orange book titled Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order and the journal The Social Frontier from the 1930s. I remember the first time I read that book, I may have underlined every sentence. But the following quote has stayed with me:

Possibly this is the fundamental reason why we are so fearful of molding the child. We are moved by no great faiths; we are touched by no great passions. We can view a world order rushing rapidly towards collapse with no more concern than the outcome of a horse race; we can see injustice, crime and misery in their most terrible forms all about us and, if we are not directly affected, register the emotions of a scientist studying white rats in a laboratory. And in the name of freedom, objectivity, and the open mind, we would transmit this general attitude of futility to our children. In my opinion this is a confession of complete moral and spiritual bankruptcy.

Counts gave me a language to understand what I had felt as a K-12 teacher and as a citizen, but more importantly as a mom now raising two little souls on the heels of 9/11, the Iraq War, and global economic collapse. Counts centers the political education of the child in his work as a moral and ethical commitment that must be at the center of schooling. He blurred the lines of education and indoctrination for me in important ways and rattled me from my naïve assumptions of schooling. He insisted that education cannot escape indoctrination and that the better question to ask is indoctrination towards what end? Education for what kind of society and world? What role should teachers play in the political education of children and of an entire citizenry? How can schools thwart apathy and indifference? And finally, why teachers and schools must “dare”?

For all these reasons and so many more, I chose the quote from Maxine Greene “Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes from being alive, awake, curious, and often furious” as these words and the study of ethics in/and/of education is still our best hope for developing practitioners and institutional structures that can dare build a social order that works for all.

To the memory of Ramon M.  Lemos (1927-2006)

Freedom is a constant struggle. Angela Davis

To educators who dare in dangerous times …

“Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes from being alive, awake, curious, and often furious” – Maxine Greene