 So education has been a central motif of my life. I grew up in a university campus in Nigeria. My father was a professor of statistics. My mother was an administrator and she retired as the first woman to be head of the university administration. And so in my family, education was almost a moral value. Actually, it kind of was a moral value. And it was also how my parents earned their living. And so because of my parents' circumstances, I was fortunate to get a good education. Because my parents were university staff, I attended the university primary school and the university secondary school. And so both of which were very good schools. And I like to think now that everything I know today, I learned in primary school. But really that I think of university primary school as sort of the launching pad from which I could leap into my full potential. Some years ago, I went back home to visit my parents. And my father is known to be a meticulous record keeper. When we were growing up, he had a file for each of his six children. And in this file, this is true. And in this file, he put in everything, you know, our school reports, notes our teachers wrote, all of that. And so I went back home and I decided to look at my file. I sort of went looking in my father's study. And so I found my kindergarten report card. And in that report card, my teacher had written, she's a brilliant child, but she refuses to do any work when she's annoyed. So I remember reading that and thinking, what? And I thought, wait, why didn't somebody smack me? But all right, please don't send me angry emails. I know that smacking is not done in your schools, but this is what I thought. I thought, you know, I was five, and clearly I was very strong-willed and wouldn't do work when I was annoyed. But what that comment showed me really was that my teacher had paid attention to me, that he had seen me, that he had paid a kind of particular attention to me. And I suspect that he did the same to the other children in my class. And I think of it now as a gift. I think that it must have taught me confidence to have been seen in that way by my teacher in kindergarten. And I will always remain grateful to him. His name was Mr. Idoko. And then there was Mrs. Kahlu. She was my teacher in grade five. Mrs. Kahlu was kind, she was patient, she was firm. And she saw me. She saw all of us in her class, grade five A. I remember once she said to me, you feel things too strongly. And there was a wistful sort of sadness in her voice, as though she knew that this, this feeling things too strongly would be both blessing and curse for me. That it would infuse my writing, but that also it would lead to that curse of the creative's depression. It was Mrs. Kahlu who first acknowledged my interest in writing and in storytelling. She nurtured it, she valued it. She created the time to read the stories I wrote. She allowed me to write plays and to produce them in class. And she stood by and she applauded. She made me feel that my passion mattered and she is in my mind an unassailable star. And then there were the other kinds of teachers. I remember Mr. Ibuna and Mr. Okabui in secondary school. I was a child with many questions and I was educated in a system in which questioning was not necessarily rewarded. In secondary school I got straight A's in all of my subjects, which would have pleased any parent. But each last day of term, my stomach would tighten with anxiety because my teachers often wrote comments about what they termed my lack of respect. And these comments always got me in trouble with my parents. And it's been 30 years almost and I still have not forgiven those teachers. Lack of respect was really my curiosity, my asking questions, my taking delight in intellectual argument, my refusal to accept easy answers, my reluctance to perform the rituals of differential fear that was often mistaken for respect. And I felt that my teachers should not have punished me for this. Now looking back, I do see how I could very well have been a bit of an annoying teenager. And yet I wish those teachers had known how to guide my questioning and how to encourage my curiosity. My point in telling these stories about teachers is not just to make the rather obvious point that teachers matter because they do. I think teachers are stars. But to say that to be a good teacher is often not just about teaching the curriculum. It's also about those things that are harder to quantify. It's about teaching confidence and making a child feel seen as an individual because when we value a student, we teach that student to value herself. I used to roll my eyes at people who when they were asked where they lived would mention two places. Alas, I have become one of those people. And I sometimes roll my eyes at myself now. But I do have two homes, one in Nigeria and one in the US. 20 years ago, I left Nigeria and I came to the US. And my reason was education. It wasn't merely that I was coming to the US to get an education, it was also that I was running away from another kind of education. I had been in what is called the science track all of my life because I did well in school and when you do well in school, they tell you that you have to study the sciences. Studying the arts was for people who did not do well. And I think that this is a great, great disservice done to students, the devaluing of the arts, which I think is the result of thinking of knowledge in a very narrowly utilitarian way. I remember when I finished, so in secondary school, the first three years, then you take an exam, which is called the junior secondary school exam, and I remember when the results came in and I happened to get the best result in the school and a teacher of mine said to me, of course you're going to be in the science class. Why would you want to study poetry? What will you do with poetry? I saw her point. Poetry was not an obviously practical skill because it didn't teach you how to build an electric circuit or, I don't know, an experiment in osmosis. But poetry and the arts are practical if we widen our definition of practical, the ability to think, the ability to have empathy, the ability to use our imaginations. I would much rather have as my physician a person who reads literature because I think that person is more likely to know that for a human being to be well, that human being must be thought of as a whole person, emotional, mental, spiritual, and not just as a logical collection of bones and flesh. What I really wanted to do was to write and to read, but I also understood the need to study something practical that would enable me earn a living. And so I went along and I studied the sciences. I came to like chemistry because I had a wonderful chemistry teacher, Mr. Achille Kaye. And I had it all nicely planned out. I would go ahead and become a doctor, which is again what is expected of everyone who does well in school, they tell you you have to be a doctor. And so I had planned it all. I would become a doctor. I would become a psychiatrist. And during the day I would walk as a psychiatrist and at night I would use my patient stories for my fiction. I think it might have worked, but after one year of medical school, I realized that I would be a very unhappy doctor. And I also didn't want to be responsible for the inadvertent death of patients. So I thought it was time to leave. And because I had been in the science track, my entire educational life, leaving medicine would have meant going to study something else that was a science. And I didn't want that. And that's when America became the place to go. I was fortunate that my sister was already here. My sister is a dual citizen. She was born in the 60s in California when my father was at Berkeley getting his PhD. And so when my sister graduated from university in Nigeria, she decided to come to the US. And so when I decided to flee the study of medicine, I had somebody here who would give me a bed to sleep on and feed me for a while. So I took the SATs, I got a scholarship and I came to the US. I had always thought of America as a place of possibility, as an aspirational place, an imperfect place, but one in which there was much to admire. Well, with the recent political situation, that image has been severely cracked, but still. And now 20 years after I came to the US, America has become home. And yet it's a home in which I will always have the emotional demeanor of a curious and content visitor. I began observing American public education very early on because I helped care for my American-born nephew, my sister's son. He was in elementary school in small town Connecticut. He was a very bright, funny, kind, lovely child, who's now a 24-year-old successful young man whom I adore. But when he was in elementary school in small town Connecticut, he very quickly started to have problems. He would come home and say that he had been sent to the principal's office. There would be teacher's notes in his bag about how he distracted other children, how he spoke up too often, how he couldn't keep still. I began to see that the teachers, and indeed the school itself, were seeing him, this young black boy, in terms that were different from others. He was not a child to them. He was a problem to be solved. He was the only black boy in his grade. Everybody else was white. But it was when his teacher started to talk about special ed, and at the time I had no idea what special ed meant, but apparently they thought that he needed something called special ed. And so my brother-in-law, his father, had decided to go in and talk to the principal. And I should say, as an aside, that my nephew likes to joke now about how when he was six years old, I was teaching him long division. I don't know, what is it called in the U.S.? So you know, the division, yeah, long division. Because I'm an African immigrant, and I sort of feel like you should know your long division when you're five years old. And so this was a child who was bright, and he learned really quickly, but he tells me now as an adult, he's like, Auntie, that was not appropriate. But what I said to him is, well, you did learn it, right? And you did do well in math. But anyway, so my brother-in-law went in to speak to the principal, and my brother-in-law wanted to ask, why does my child complain about other children doing the same thing, talking, not being still, and but he is the child who always gets singled out. And the principal said to my brother-in-law, when we look at him, we don't see any difference. Now, my nephew was not just the only black boy in his grade. His dark skinned, he's easily distinguishable. He's not in any way racially ambiguous. Now, in telling the story, I'm reminded of something that happened more recently. A friend of mine moved from England to come to the US to teach for a little bit. And this is to teach in college. And he said that at the first faculty orientation meeting that they had, he expected to be told about academic rigor and making sure that, I don't know, exam policy or something. But he said the emphasis of the meeting was to tell the instructors to make sure that their students were never made to feel uncomfortable. And he was surprised by this. Now, I understand the good intentions behind that idea of keeping everyone comfortable, which is a particularly American idea. But I think it's important to make peace with discomfort. There's something perverse about expecting always to be comfortable. Life is messy. Sometimes discomfort opens us up to growth and to knowledge and to meaning. And it's especially relevant today in America, in a country with deep political divisions, I think it's impossible to engage honestly without some discomfort. What that principle in Connecticut was doing that day with my brother-in-law is that he was choosing comfort over truth. Because to acknowledge the truth, which is that my nephew, of course, was different, would be to ask why all the kids do something and one child is singled out over and over. And that child happens to be the black child. Acknowledging it would also mean having to ask, does the fact that the teachers are nothing like him have anything to do with his being singled out over and over again? Of course, teachers who do not look like you can be wonderful for you. But the truth is that teachers are human beings who bring to their jobs, as we all do, the totality of their own particular experience. And teachers naturally come to expect what they themselves experienced. And it leads to an expectation from teachers that the child's family must do things a particular way. But things that are important to a teacher might not necessarily be important to a child's family. If a child's family doesn't experience school as a teacher did, then that teacher is likely to judge the family. So if a teacher grew up with parents who diligently signed those forms that you get in a nice folder in your backpack and the child doesn't, that teacher is likely to feel a certain kind of way about it. I want to tell a story about a woman I met in a bookstore. I'd gone in to look at children's books. I have a three-year-old, actually almost three-year-old. She's three and two weeks, and I'm beyond excited. But even before I had her, I would often go in to buy children's books because I have nephews and nieces, and I'm the auntie who's involved in everybody's life and who sort of gets in their business. And so I was in a bookstore, and there was a woman in the bookstore, and I was talking to her about how I was having a difficult time finding children's books, early children's books that had black characters. Actually, to be completely honest in the storytelling, I had first said diverse characters, and then I thought I needed to be clear because even that can be very murky when we talk about, sometimes it's important, I think, to unpack what we mean by diverse. So I said very clearly that I wanted to find books that had black children. Because the books that didn't have, they mostly had animal characters, but the ones that didn't had white children. And she was very sympathetic, and she said, yes, I see why you would want books like that. Her emphasis was on you, as though she herself did not think this was particularly important for her. I think there's something wonderful and affirming about reading about your reality and reading what is familiar and seeing yourself reflected in fiction and in literature. And that particular pleasure should never be denied anyone. But it is equally important to read about people who are not like you. If for anything, then, because the world is not full of people like you. I wished that that woman had also considered it important for herself to have children's books in which the characters are diverse, to have white children and black children and Asian children and Hispanic children and children who are different in all kinds of ways. Because if she reads diverse books to her children, then she's preparing them, hopefully, for a world in which their conception of people is wider and healthier. I like to think of myself as a lifelong student. And I do not merely want to read about people who do not look like me, but I also want to hear even people I disagree with. And so, for example, even though my politics are left-leaning, I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, which is decidedly not left-leaning. And I deliberately seek out and I want to learn how people who do not see the world as I do think. Because I think it helps me better able to understand the world. The content of education matters. It's not enough to be educated. It's important also to talk about the content of our education. I think very often, for example, that until Galileo put up his telescope to look at the sky, in the great and the grand universities across Europe, students were being taught at the heavens where this sort of perfect arrangement of beautiful layers of, I don't know, gold and silver. And also in thinking about the education that happened in the colonized parts of Africa and Asia and Latin America, is to realize that education often meant teaching the so-called natives self-hate. And it is not surprising in talking to many older people in these parts of the world, in Nigeria, for example, that they often have very disturbing views of their own history. And it's a result of the education that they had. And I was recently reading about Hillary Clinton being wiped out of books in one particular state in the US. So there is also a magical thinking going on. So it's not enough to have an education, the content matters, and books should have a range of people. And the reason books should have a range of people is not because we want to be politically correct, but because we want to be accurate. You cannot understand the world if you know only about a fraction of the world. In small town Connecticut, my nephew finally left that school and went to another school in Middles... So it wasn't small town. It was sort of not very small town in Connecticut. And I was thinking, should I name names? But I thought this is not a good place to name names because I feel like somebody will figure out and then write, you know, she said the people in Connecticut. Because also I think I'm only using my examples, I think, to talk about a larger, what I think is a larger phenomenon. But when my nephew moved to another school, I came to see that there's a fundamental unfairness that is embedded in the structure of American public education because of property taxes. All public education is not equal. It should be, but it's not. And I think it's important to acknowledge that because then we have to question America's claim to having a system that is purely meritocratic. I also came to understand, from observing my nephew's experience, that in America sometimes race becomes class. Or, as a friend of mine recently put it, they see the black child and they immediately think title one. By the way, when my friend said that, I had no idea what title one meant, so it was sort of an opportunity for me to get an education. This friend, who lives here, who lives in Maryland, had problems with her child's school and she said that they couldn't see anything past his blackness. And that there was often the automatic assumption that he had come from an economically and educationally deprived background. But both his parents, Nigerian immigrants, were physicians. And it made me think about how many black and brown children, how many poor children of any race who are seen in terms only of their need will grow up with their dignity eroded because they were not seen as full human beings but only as a single thing, a person in need. Now this same friend of mine, the Nigerian immigrant who's a physician, has children who I think it's fair to say are not meek or mild mannered. And she said that her son would often, that a teacher had said about her son, he's so rough. And I think saying he's so rough is one way of thinking about him. But then there's another way which is he's assertive and confident. Now I'm not suggesting that we excuse bad behavior. Bad behavior should never be excused. And actually I have a little confession to make which is that there's a certain informality in American schools between instructor and instructed that I'm not very keen on. Because I think it sometimes blurs the lines and enables bad behavior in students. But again, I am an African immigrant and I came from a very strict school system. The point I want to make about bad behavior is that it is important to be clear about when we are sanctioning the behavior and when we are sanctioning not so much the behavior but the body exhibiting that behavior. And here's another story about a woman I don't know very well, but I met at my daughter's daycare. And she told me a story about her son in daycare. So he's three and a half, four maybe. And he's playing with another child. Her son is black, her son's friend is white. And she dropped in to visit the class and they're playing in the science center. And the teacher says to the white child, oh, that's so good, you're going to be a scientist. And then later says to her son, oh, that's so good, you're going to be a mechanic. And she said that she got very upset and she spoke to the teacher about it later. And the teacher got very upset and said she hadn't meant anything bad. And at the end, both of them were in tears. And something had gone wrong there. I think both of them were sincere. But they were not hearing the same thing. It was almost as though listening to her, in my imagination, they were inhabiting two walls that were not intersecting. How do we bridge those two walls? And we must bridge them if public education is to succeed. Maybe, maybe if the teacher saw the context of the child and his history as a black boy in a country that has systematically broken the dreams of black people. A country that has made non-black people think of black people in stereotypical ways. It takes a willingness to be uncomfortable and it takes courage and it's not easy. But I think it's worth it if we are to mold a generation of people who will be better and who will do better than we have. We need to broaden and widen our conception of how things are and of how things should be. A child is never a single thing. A child whose family doesn't sign all those nice forms in the folder in her backpack can also be a child who is loved and cared for. It may merely be that the child's parents don't really know how the system works. A child who fails a test can also be a very intelligent child who needs to learn in a different way. I know how many times I sat bored to death in class because I didn't feel challenged. Maybe we need to ask real questions about teachers and who becomes a teacher and who gets hired. How is the recruiting done? I was thinking recently of Maryland, which is my American home, and wondering if teachers are recruited from the historically black colleges and if they are recruited, do people think of things like transportation? Because I think when you're a student and you're doing your student teaching in your fourth year and you don't have a car and the school is very far away, then it becomes almost impossible for you to do it. And without the student teaching experience, you're not likely to get hired in the sorts of schools where maybe your presence is needed. I think we also need to question how we define who belongs and who doesn't belong. I remember once a friend of mine saying that a teacher wasn't a good fit at her child's school. This friend, by the way, is black and she's talking about a teacher who is also black. The teacher had an inner city accent. Now the teacher spoke English perfectly, her grandma was fine, but apparently she had an inner city accent and so it had been decided that she wasn't a good fit. And that made me wonder, how do we define good fit? What determines good fit? And will children benefit from hearing somebody who speaks in a way that's different? It also made me think that what was in question, her accent, was itself a consequence of structural exclusion and public education has a moral duty and a civic duty to start to dismantle that structural exclusion. We need to remember that students are not employees and schools are not corporations and the point of education is not to maximize profit, it is to maximize human potential. I've always kind of liked that. Okay. And I think it's also important to remember that human potential is this beautiful, gloriously messy, inco-it thing that can never have one single solution and that there are many, many solutions and thank you.