The Freedom to Care

Abstract

This chapter reflects on distorted visions of education, care, and freedom. It revisits the contours of the kids' perspectives of care as they played out over the course of the project, examining what these young people have to say about care—its value, its rewards, its invisibilities, and contradictions. Against this backdrop, the chapter considers the current realities of care in a neoliberal capitalist society, limited and structured by gender-, race-, and class-bias; institutional racism and anti-Blackness; and economic strictures that narrow people's conceptualizations of time, productivity, and human value. The young people's visions offer much-needed hope—and in their understandings, one can locate possibilities for a new narrative of care. Drawing on the continuing challenges that the Park Central School students identified and the insights that they offered, the chapter then imagines an alternative social orientation in which care and care work take their rightful place at the center of everyday life—highly visible and highly regarded not only in the spheres of family and school, but in the very fabric of democratic society and in the fundamental understanding of freedom and social justice itself.