Satisfaction is Overrated
From, The Decree, Volume I, Issue 2
Craig Livermore
Executive Director, NJ LEEP, Inc.
Perhaps it is a good thing to be perpetually dissatisfied. Perhaps it is of benefit to be as Neo in The Matrix—living with a constant thorn in one’s heart because one knows that the world that we see–is not the world that should be. And one knows as Neo did that there was never really any choice. One is impelled to take the red pill to unveil the falsity, and to allow for the creation of a new reality.
And so as NJ LEEP has made a successful start, it somehow does not feel sufficient. As we have interviewed 130 eighth grade students from Newark, East Orange and Jersey City for our Summer Law Institute and After-School program, it gnaws at us that we can only take thirty students as our first freshman class this year. And so we must find a way to raise money to double the size of our in-coming class in 2008. And in spite of the very positive response we have received from students, parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and administrators, we have also met myriads of students who have already given up on the dream by the eighth and ninth grades when we first meet them. And so we will be speaking with other educational organizations, brainstorming and planning, to see if we in some manner can extend our services back to the seventh and eighth grade so we can reach a much greater number of students at an earlier level of adolescent development.
Because I am kept up at night with thoughts of the depression and angst faced by my former students in Brooklyn, which we are also seeing in the faces of students here in urban New Jersey as the tears well up in the eyes of the 13-year-olds we are interviewing. As I make a futile quest to grasp an ever-elusive peace because of the internal demons such students are facing arising from external circumstance, I somehow know that such restlessness is really a blessing. For the mission of urban education is not only about who will have access to money, power and privilege in 20 years—it is at a much deeper level of reality about the deep psychological pain born of dreams deferred, dreams confused, dreams unstructured, and dreams un-nurtured.
Yet, we must at the same time honor the blessings. For example, NJ LEEP has trained nine wonderful Seton Hall Law students who are teaching “An Introduction to Constitutional Rights” in public high schools and middle schools. These law students are manifesting deft and powerful teaching technique after only twelve hours of training and have jumped with whole-hearted commitment into the fray. We also have met and are working with numerous passionate and committed teachers and administrators in the public schools with which we are partnering. And our work truly cannot be done without them.
So perhaps the answer is to recognize the blessings, but to never become complacent. NJ LEEP has on its office wall a print by Romare Beardon. The print is of a painting created in 1984 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The painting features a black girl and a black boy, both reading a book. The caption reads in large letters: “The Politics of Excellence.” I ask all of you to meditate upon this caption with NJ LEEP. For if complacency and fear are the enemies inside all of us, then it is the politics of excellence which will overcome these enemies.
