I know all of us in this room have collaborated in a single intellectual experience in liberal education, reading The House on Mango Street.

You have had many different discussions about The House on Mango Street. These discussions have centered around home, poverty, understanding who Esperanza is and the world in which she lives. We have discussed her education, the characters in her world, the novel’s form, and the challenges of Cisneros’ writing style. You have openly expressed your opinions about the work.

I would daresay you have also discussed the beginning paragraph and the last vignette. However, I want to remind you of those two sections of the novel today, because I think what Cisneros says there has a great bearing on the meaning of liberal education. For a few moments, let us think about the central character as a person who is writing her autobiography.

Here is the first paragraph of the novel:

We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. Each time it seemed there’d be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six: Mama, Papa, Carolos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me.(p.3)

And with that paragraph, the world of Esperanza Cordero opens up. We see the people, the house, the school, the poverty, the joy, the difficulties of this young girl’s life.

All through the novel there are indications that she is straining to escape: the new bike is a symbol of Esperanza’s developing independence and desire for a different life, as is her dancing at the baptism party. I am certain you have your own favorite instances of her yearning for freedom. The description of her own house near the end of the novel is another such instance.

Then we come to the last vignette, and we see that the writing makes a circle, and that she has freed herself from confinement. The work you have just read is her pathway; the subject matter of her life is her tool. She has just shared with us the world from which she has escaped, and broadened our vision by allowing us to enter her world through her eyes. We know how she has risen beyond the circumstances in which she first found herself. She is the person who did not belong and did belong. In telling her story, she shows how she did belong, and reveals how she gained her freedom.

Here is the last vignette:

Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes

I like to tell stories. I tell them inside my head. I tell them after the mailman says, Here’s your mail. Here’s your mail he said.

I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoes take. I say, "and so she trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked."

I like to tell stories. I am going to tell you a story about a girl who didn’t want to belong.

We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, but what I remember most is Mango Street, sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to.

I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbye sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free.

One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away.

Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away?

They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.

Pp, 109-110.

To me the story of Esperanza is a wonderful metaphor for liberal education. The educational philosopher Maxine Greene conceives of education this way in her work The Dialectic of Freedom: "...education is conceived as a process of futuring, of releasing persons to become different, of provoking persons to repair lacks and to take action to create themselves. Action signifies beginnings or the taking of initiatives; and, in education, beginnings must be thought possible if authentic learning is expected to occur." (p. 22)

The story of Esperanza is the fictional autobiography of a Mexican-American girl caught in poverty. However, she uses her intelligence, her talents and her opportunities for education to act, to take the initiative, to participate in that process of "futuring" and "release" that epitomizes education for Maxine Greene.

Sometimes people of privilege have to overcome their circumstances as well. One such individual is Eleanor Roosevelt, who was First Lady of the United States from 1933-1945, and then the first United States Delegate to the United Nations. This summer, I had the opportunity to visit Washington, DC and to visit the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Monument. It was a very moving experience for me because during the past couple of years, I have read Blanche Wiesen Cook’s fabulous two-volume (so far) biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. The Roosevelt Monument commemorates all four terms for which Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president. As you are traveling along the path, and seeing sculptures representing the various programs for which he is remembered (the New Deal, Social Security), you finally come to the bronze statue of Eleanor. She seems only slightly larger than life sized as she gazes toward the Potomac River. As she stands there, I imagine her poised to act, to help, to use her unusual intelligence and powers of persuasion to help the American people, to assist the disadvantaged. I see her gazing into the future. Carved on the stone behind her are the words "First United States Delegate to the United Nations." Nowhere does it say she was First Lady. However, she is the only wife of a US president to be commemorated in a monument to a President in our nation’s capital. But it is obvious that she is there on her own, not just because she was married to Franklin Roosevelt.

Eleanor Roosevelt was a child of great privilege, whose mother died when she was very young, and whose father and brothers were alcoholics. She felt imprisoned by her Victorian upbringing, very lonely, and in some ways taken advantage of by her privilege, and by the public life she had to lead as First Wife, especially because her husband, the President, betrayed her by falling in love with someone else. However, in her early days, after the death of her parents, she took great joy in her education at the school of Marie Souvestre, Allenswood, in England. The school, was "a collegiate environment that took the education of women seriously, at a time when they were denied access to the great halls of learning." Vol.I, p. 105.

Eleanor Roosevelt always credited her education at the Allenswood School as a freeing influence in her life. "A passionate humanist committed to social justice, Marie Souvestre inspired young women to think about leadership, to think for themselves, and above all to think about a nobler, more decent future. To her mind, nothing was dull, no subject irrelevant. Everything creative and imaginative was encouraged." (Vol. 1, p. 105)

"Unlike [Eleanor’s] mother and her grandmother, Marie Souvestre encouraged direct inquiry, admired a free-ranging, probing intelligence...rigorous thought was immediately rewarded...the greatest gift Marie Souvestre gave to Eleanor Roosevelt [was]the chance to really know herself." (Vol. 1, p. 107)

In a real way, her education gave Eleanor Roosevelt freedom to rise above the restrictions of the Victorian Society in which she grew up, to become herself. As Blanche Cook says, "Eleanor Roosevelt never turned away from the memory of Marie Souvestre. Her influence and spirit burned deeply within ER, and her teachings continually pointed in the direction of what was possible by way of independence, self-fulfillment, public activity, and human understanding." p. 124.

This description of ER’s liberal education reminds me of what some contemporary scholars say about liberal education today in our colleges and universities:

In their work, Contemporary Understanding of Liberal Education, Carol Geary Schneider and Robert Schoenberg name five explicit learning goals implicit in undergraduate curricula: (pp. 7-8)

1. Acquiring intellectual skills or capacities, including writing, quantitative reasoning, oral expression, computer use, a second language, and the development of skill in moral reasoning and negotiating difference.
2. Understanding multiple modes of inquiry and approaches to knowledge, including hands-on approaches.
3. Developing societal, civic and global knowledge. This expectation is "that students will learn about cultures separated from the dominant culture by distance and/or assumptions, experiences, or differential social power."
4. Gaining self-knowledge and grounded values.
5. Integration of learning from general education through a concentration.

These scholars are talking about the education students receive in today’s liberal arts colleges, but to me the education they are talking about sounds remarkably like the education of Mrs. Roosevelt.

Before we enter the question and answer period, I want to tell you a little something something about my own liberal arts education, and how it started. All of you have a story about how you got here to Wells College, and you will have stories about what happens while you are here.

I was a very protected and restricted only child of parents who were college graduates, but who had very few financial resources. In high school, I did very well, and studied mostly math, chemistry and physics, but no foreign languages. I was very involved in student government, band, clubs, my church. I attended to Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, GA400 miles away from my home in the mountains of Virginia. I had never visited there before I went to College.

During the first year, along with English, Calculus and Classics I had to take a language for the requirement, so I took French. It was difficult, frustrating at times. But in the second year, something happened--my mind flew open in intermediate French because of the teacher and because of one work we read that year, very slowly, very laboriously. In class we read Andre Gidé’s La Symphonie Pastorale. I had to look up the definitions of the definitions. We inched along and then had to discuss the work in French! To say it was painful is an understatement.

André Gide, a Nobel Prize winner in Literature, wrote La Symphonie Pastorale in 1918. It is one of the works upon which his reputation was built. Fame came late to him. He did not pursue it, but rather he valued sincerity and frankness and the right to think freely. The freedom of thinking is what touched me in the novel, and how one can rise from one’s circumstances to see the world anew, and to think of one thing in terms of another.

The story is the first person narrative of a French pastor who, in the course of his work, finds a wild child out in the country. This was a favorite kind of story of the 18th century in France. The child is actually a teenager, and the pastor takes her home to save her; he and his wife name her Gertrudeshe is dirty, full of bugs, and she is blind. He believes it is his moral obligation to educate her. During the course of this process he falls in love with her.

There is great interplay in the work between seeing spiritually and emotionally, and seeing physically. Contrasting themes arise: there are moral vision versus physical vision, and duty versus passion.

But what really opened things up for me as a student of 19 was how the pastor overcame the difficult of explaining colors to his blind student.

He takes her to a concert to hear Beethoven’s 6th symphony: The Pastoral Symphony. Gertrude ask the pastor if what he sees with his eyes is as beautiful as the scene she imagines from the Second Movement of the Symphony, which is the scene beside the brook. From that moment he uses the symphony, and the different notes and intensities of the music to teach her colors, and all the dimensions of the visual world.

As a young college student struggling with language and serious literature really for the first time, my was awakened. I majored in French literature and went on to do a Ph.D. in medieval and Renaissance literature.

The lesson I learned was that learning to think and see freely would send me into places and open opportunities I had never imagined. I think it is the same lesson we can learn from Esperanza and from Eleanor Roosevelt. My education would provide me with the moral fiber to have clear vision in the face of obstacles. I can tell you that my education has never failed me, and I feel very certain, in the classes of the faculty who are teaching this course, and your other courses, you too will use and expand your intellect and be introduced to the best of liberal education. I urge you to let this expansion of your mind occur.

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