Diversity and Inclusion: Toward a Curriculum for Human Beings

This is, in part, an effort to gain perspective on our constructs and our categories, to break through what Dewey once called “the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.“’ My reasons for wanting to make this effort have to do with a desire to communicate a sense of how haunted I often feel, how badly I want to break with the taken-for-granted, to see and to say. Like many in our field, I am preoccupied by the “savage inequalities” Jonathan Kozol describes .2 My interest in coping with diversity and striving toward significant inclusion derives to a large degree from an awareness of the savagery, the brutal marginalizations, the structured silences, the imposed invisibility so present all around. Listening to the continuous talk about the AIDS epidemic as an inexorably advancing plague, I have been touched by those who have reminded us of the ways in which marginalization can destroy a community. Excluding and demeaning great numbers of the population, we have not paid heed to what has been happening; we have not responded in time to a catastrophe that now endangers us all, no matter what our class or gender or ethnic origin. How can we not recall the long years in which we were corrupted by our distancing of African Americans in this country, by our institutionalized indifference and neglect? How can some of us not remember the narratives read by gay and lesbian adolescents in Colorado, confronting not only the law that erodes their civil rights, but constant fears of violence and violation? These are the narratives of young people often deprived of role models, sometimes thrown out of their homes, publicly defined as deviant, feeling wholly alone in the world. I think of the philosopher’s admonition (which most of us would say we believe in absolutely) that all persons should be treated as ends, never as means,3 and what that obligation entails. I think of what we say to one another about the dignity and integrity of each human being, and about how that relates to our conceptions of democracy. I think of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman emphasizing the importance of children’s rights-their rights to good education, corrective health measures, and (yes) to leave neglectful or abusive homes. That reinforces my conviction that the young people in Colorado, like many of those in New