ABSTRACT
WHAT WE ARE faced with in the course of the most ordinary lifetime is terrifying. The desire to order chaos through simplified schemas, to ward off the felt dangers of ambiguity, seems perhaps more “human” a characteristic than any other. The educator who endeavors to rattle complacent cages, who attempts to “wrest us anew” from the threat of conformism, undoubtedly faces the treacherous ghosts of the other’s fears and terrors, which in turn evoke one’s own demons. The path of understanding, if it is not to “simplify,” must be tread gently. Yet if one believes in alternatives to the reductive binaries of good and evil, “purity and corruption,” one is challenged to invite the other, with compassion and
fortitude, to learn to see things differently, no matter how perilous the course for all involved.
