Maxine Green
(b. 1917)
I imagine there is a photograph somewhere of her in a cafe in Amsterdam in late November. The expatriate Sidney Bichet plays the blues on his clarinet. At the table where she sits is Hannah Arendt and Bertolt Brecht. They are taking turns at defining "wide-awakeness" over brandies aged in apricot. It is 1947.
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The body of her work is nothing short of a kind of Brooklyn Bridge of interdisciplinarity, with the literary, philosophical and historical in the same conversation about public education. As much as any living educator her life's work seeks to bridge and cohere the academic out of its tower of sophisticated babble and into the richness of the ordinary life. She belongs to a line of thinkers who draw their intellectual lives from the bounty of their humanity.