A Post for my homies in Ann Arbor–A$a Soltan Rahmani video

This week I’ve had the pleasure of teaching 12th graders in Ann Arbor, MI about the Iranian Revolution–based on the amazing graphic novel Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. If you don’t already own Persepolis, RUN (do not walk) to your nearest bookstore and buy it. It’s an amazing tool for understanding the political situation in Iran, as well as the deep suffering of the Persian people. The comic, besides being incredibly beautifully drawn, is heart-wrenching, tender, and hilariously funny at the same time. (And if you’re not a book person, there’s a movie version too that is equally as good.)

In any case, when I stumbled on this video made by A$a Soltan Rahmani (a self-described citizen of “Tehrangeles,” CA), it made me think of my new Michigan friends. Enjoy it, and listen carefully to the lyrics as she describes her own journey from a small desert town in Iran to the big desert town of LA, where the LA river is “paved in gold.”  (One caveat: though it starts out fairly innocently, the video does contain some footage from the 1979 revolution and thereafter, so it’s not one to show young children.)

Thanks, Ann Arbor folk, for making me feel so welcome in your class! (And a shout-out to my soul sistah Sianne Ngai, English professor extraordinaire, who first introduced me to A$a’s work.  A$a’s a one-of-a-kind woman who, in her own unique way, plays with and challenges the stereotypes of what a “Persian woman” should be.)

And for those of you waiting for part 2 of my post on Hildegard von Bingen, it’s coming, albeit slower than expected.  Just hang in there!

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Malala Yousafzai: Why Inclusion Matters

Malala Yousafzai (Source)

So just in case you were wondering if gender inclusion in the classroom is still an issue, let’s take a moment to keep in our hearts (and if you’re the praying type, prayers) the 14 year old girl just shot today by the Taliban because she had the audacity to advocate for girls’ education.

Malala Yousafzai was on a bus filled with fellow schoolgirls when the vehicle was stopped and a man asked for her by name, pulled out a gun, and shot her in the head twice.  Apparently, she’s been on the Taliban hit list for some time and the group has made clear that if they she survives this attack, they’ll try again.

Malala was targeted because she has become a visible symbol of girls education in an area (the Swat valley in Pakistan) where the Taliban have put women and girls under fire.  She has been featured in a documentary about female education (be warned: the doc has some very disturbing scenes), written a diary for BBC about her struggle to attend school, and has received a number of prizes for child activists, both in her own country and internationally.

What does this mean for those of us who are lucky enough to live, teach, and attend school in areas where access to education is not restricted by gender?  To me, it’s pretty simple:  there are people (some of them actively organized into multinational armed gangs) who want to erase women.  From public spaces, from history books, from life-saving professions like the one Malala wants to pursue.  Real women and girls suffer every day from this attempt at active erasure.  It’s not a metaphor for them.

Our task, therefore, is to strive as hard as we can to keep women visible, in history, in the classroom, and in everyday life.  Our classrooms are our own very small, very subdued, but very real battleground.  With every child or teen we teach, we have an opportunity to transmit values of equality and peace.  And we have the chance to “bring back” some of the women who have been erased from many tellings of the story of humankind.  These invisible sisters of history are Malala’s predecessors.  Some of them were prominent and well-respected in their day and others, like Malala, were forcibly silenced, or even killed, for their acts of self-expression.

So while we may not have much direct impact on events in Swat, Pakistan, we do have a duty to make an intentional effort to address issues of gender in our own classrooms.  Malala Yousafzai would expect no less.

And lest you think this is all very noble, but not central to Waldorf education in particular, I’ll leave you with Steiner’s prescient words, written in his seminal work The Philosophy of Freedom way back in 1894:

So long as men debate whether woman, from her “natural disposition,” is fitted for this, that, or the other profession, the so-called Woman’s Question will never advance beyond the most elementary stage. What it lies in woman’s nature to strive for had better be left to woman herself to decide… To all who fear an upheaval of our social structure… we need only reply that a social structure in which the status of one-half of humanity is unworthy of a human being stands itself in great need of improvement.

Amen, brother.

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