E-Book Overview
When Huston Diehl began teaching a fourth-grade class in a "Negro" elementary school in rural Louisa County, Virginia, the school’s white superintendent assured her that he didn't expect her to teach "those children" anything. She soon discovered how these low expectations, widely shared by the white community, impeded her students' ability to learn. With its overcrowded classrooms, poorly trained teachers, empty bookshelves, and meager supplies, her segregated school was vastly inferior to the county's white elementary schools, and the message it sent her students was clear: "dream not of other worlds." In her often lyrical memoir, Diehl reveals how, in the intimacy of the classroom, her students reached out to her, a young white northerner, and shared their fears, anxieties, and personal beliefs. Repeatedly surprised and challenged by her students, Diehl questions her long-standing middle-class assumptions and confronts her own prejudices. In doing so, she eloquently reflects on what the students taught her about the hurt of bigotry and the humiliation of poverty as well as dignity, courage, and resiliency. Set in the waning days of the Jim Crow South, Dream Not of Other Worlds chronicles an important moment in American history. Diehl examines the history of black education in the South and narrates the dramatic struggle to integrate Virginia's public schools. Meeting with some of her former students and colleagues and visiting the school where she once taught, she considers what has--and has not--changed after more than thirty years of integrated schooling. This provocative book raises many issues that are of urgent concern today: the continuing social consequences of segregated schools, the role of public education in American society, and the challenges of educating minority and poor children.
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Dream Not of Other W�lds Teaching in a segregated elementary school, 1970
Hust� Diehl
. . . . . . . .Dream . . . . . . . Not . . . . .of . . Other . . . . . . .Worlds .......................
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. . . . . . . . . .sightline . . . . . . . . . books ................................. The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction Patricia Hampl and Carl H. Klaus, series editors
An Obermann Center for Advanced Studies Selection
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Huston Diehl
Dream Not of Other Worlds Teaching in a Segregated
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Elementary School, 1970 University of Iowa Press Iowa City
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University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2007 by Huston Diehl www.uiowapress.org All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. “To You” and “Theme for English B,” copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes; “Migration,” “Stars,” “Long View: Negro,” “Merry-Go-Round,” “The Dream Keepers,” “As I Grew Older,” and “Dream Variations” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes copyright © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes, used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. and reprinted by permission of Harold Ober Associates Inc. A section of “ Where Is the Jim Crow Section on This Merry-Go-Round?” and a short excerpt from “A Part of Me” were previously published as “ We’re All Colored” in the Massachusetts Review 47:2 (Summer 2006) and were reprinted in 2007 in The Messy Self, edited by Jennif