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In this essay, Jeff Duncan-Andrade explores the concept of hope, which was central to the Obama campaign, as essential for nurturing urban youth. He first identifies three forms of "false hope"-hokey hope, mythical hope, and hope deferred-pervasive in and peddled by many urban schools. Discussion of these false hopes then gives way to Duncan-Andrade's conception of "critical hope," explained through the description of three necessary elements of educational practice that produce and sustain true hope. Through the voices of young people and their teachers, and the invocation of powerful metaphor and imagery, Duncan-Andrade proclaims critical hope's significance for an education that relieves undeserved suffering in communities.
The idea that hope alone will transform the world, and action undertaken in that kind of naïveté, is an excellent route to hopelessness, pessimism, and fatalism. But the attempt to do without hope, in the struggle to improve the world, as if that struggle could be reduced to calculated acts alone, or a purely scientific approach, is a frivolous illusion. (Freire, 1997, p. 8)
Barack Obama's presidential campaign positioned him as the leader who could help restore hope to the nation. Drawing heavily from his widely read memoir The Audacity of Hope (2006), the campaign used hope as a core principle around which Obama laid out his vision for "reclaiming the American dream." However, Obama was not the first to use a framework of hope to generate social movement. Historically, hope has been a theme in the lives and movements of the poor and dispossessed in the United States. During the civil rights era, as well as other key historical moments of social change, the nation's hope connected moral outrage to action aimed at resolving undeserved suffering.
In the past three decades, however, there has been an assault on hope, particularly in our nation's urban centers. This attack has taken place on numerous fronts, including disinvestment in schools and overinvestment in a prison industrial complex. Such policies have eroded true hope and given rise to false hope, a reactionary distortion of the radical premise of hope. Therefore, this essay begins by cautioning educators against three types of false hope often promulgated in urban schools: hokey hope, mythical hope, and hope deferred.
The second half of this essay attends...