The Lessons to Be Learned
By Arthur Levine

Arthur Levine is the president of Teachers College, the applauded graduate school of Education at Columbia University. He has hosted Everett Interns at meetings in his own home for the last several years.

This has been a terrible time filled with horrible images. We have had to explain to our children things that are incomprehensible to us. The days ahead will continue to be filled with pain as we learn about and mourn the losses of friends, relatives, and acquaintances. I am concerned about what follows then. It has been said on broadcast after broadcast that American life will never be the same again. Rather than waiting for the changes to happen to us, perhaps we have an opportunity to choose the changes we would like to occur.

I am an educator, so I will talk about the schools. We have a moment in which we can choose the values we want our children to learn in their classes. Amid reports of Arab citizens or visitors being harassed, I would like my children taught about tolerance and the strength that diversity brings.

In a time when our television screens are filled with stories of heroic volunteerism, I would like my children to learn about altruism and the responsibility of service. This is a good time for schools to add vitality to service requirements that have grown dusty and disconnected, to make services not simply an extracurricular activity but an active part of the curriculum.

In an age in which voting rates and participation in civic life has declined, I would like my daughters to learn about community. Never have there been more vivid demonstrations of the meaning of community than we are seeing in our streets and public squares today. Schools have the opportunity to take that experience and translate it into an educational experience which helps students learn the ways and meanings of civic participation, the power of and the mechanisms for dissent, and the manner in which groups can constructively change our community.

In an era in which America is inextricably interconnected with the rest of the world, as September 11 painfully showed us, I would like my children to learn about that world in a manner we have never before accomplished. The canon of literature our children read should be expanded beyond Western writings to include global works, not because this is politically correct, but because it is essential.

We must teach more about other nations, their languages, and the meaning of a global society. It would be practical to have our children spend time in other countries and to make a concerted effort to invite foreign students and teachers to this country - even when there may be pressure to do exactly the opposite in the aftermath of the World Trade Center disaster.

In our schools, and even more so in our homes, the real challenge will not be to match these values with our words, but with our deeds. If there is any inconsistency in our response to this challenge, then our words will teach children the ideal, and our deeds will teach them how much we can safely ignore the ideal.