Ira Shor: Liberating Education

Growing up in the South Bronx in the 1950s, Ira Shor was bored and mischievous in school, but curious and engaged outside of class. “We were being treated like morons and turned into robots,” he later wrote of himself and his fellow students, “and I rebelled against the stupidity.” He became an eleven-year-old leader of student resistance, starting a school newspaper that his principal soon banned.

But Shor was intellectually gifted, so his teachers wooed him, telling him he was smarter than his peers. One of his teachers called his mother, who took a day off from work to come in and discuss her son’s behavior. She explained that he was bored in school, but when the teacher responded that the alternative was private school, she backed down, ashamed of being working-class. Eventually, with his mother’s encouragement, Shor became a star student, and even a teacher’s pet. That is, until the upheaval of the 1960s, when he got swept up in protest culture and rediscovered his taste for challenging authority.

When Shor began working as a professor at the City University of New York in 1971, he was eager to provide his working-class students with a different kind of education. He stayed on at CUNY, this approach to teaching is rooted in the belief that all education is inherently political. It empowers students to pose and solve problems in their own lives, engage in critical conversations about the systems of power that hold them down, and liberate themselves and others in order to transform the world.