Quote of the Day

	Caring for youth and helping them develop the strength to face the challenges in their lives involves fostering hope and not promising the impossible. Optimism, which conveys the belief that things will turn out right, is not the same as hope, which is an abiding, psychological, sociological, and political faith that the world can be better if only you try. Hope promises nothing material but promotes dignity, self-respect, and a spirit of struggle. Creating hope in oneself as a teacher and nourishing or rekindling it in one’s students is the central issue educators face these days. After 30 years of teaching and trying to reform public schools while continuing to work in a framework of hope, I have had to examine the sources of my own hope as well as my struggles with the temptation to despair and quit. This examination has taken me on a personal journey that has led to some ideas about how hope can be instilled and nurtured in young people. One of the most powerful of those ideas concerns the value of imagination in creating hope. The first step in gaining that value is to create an environment in which the imagination can thrive. The novelist George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch that “if youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us” (p. 590). This is a profound truth that caring adults must internalize and practice. We cannot teach hope unless we ourselves are hopeful, not merely in a general sense but in specific ways for individual children. Teaching hope involves focusing on strengths and cultivating a hopeful learning community.
	HERBERT KOHL Kohl, H. (2000) Hope and the imagination. Reaching Today's Youth, Vol.4 No.4, pp.39–41