What is Education?

I am teaching this documentary and doing an accompanying project with my students based on Vik Muniz's powerful social art project on garbage in Brasil. I truly was different after watching this film. Its called "The Waste Land" directed by Lucy Walker. I need to do things like this. It is in my heart to do them and while I know that my path with always come back to teaching in more formal classrooms, my life will not reach its full purpose until I spend time finding and learning from and documenting the stories of the people of this Earth. I have to meet them and love them and know their lives. Teaching is nothing without these stories. We spend so much time teaching about things that narrow our view to a single test or way of thinking. we start believing at our root that a letter grade is the most important thing in our lives. we begin to value ourselves and others based on performance at a desk and we become a patch of 2'x2'x6' nothingness. Strong words, I know, but education is not that. education is not copying worksheets and filling in small bubbles with a #2 lead pencil. It is spending time in a trash heap learning to love people who have become the fringe of society. it is involving them in something greater than themselves so they can step back and see how narrow they once saw their own lives. This CAN happen in our classrooms. we CAN teach our students who they are. we CAN show them how to step back from cares that mean nothing to the depths of what life has to offer. this is not idealism, this is truth. and so few of us are brave enough to teach it. we are scared of what it might do to us. and to them.