2009 Recipient Special: Presentation Remarks
by Madam Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella, Supreme Court of Canada

Pr May 7, 2009, New York City

Fifty years ago this spring, in a lecture at Cambridge University, C. P. Snow dropped what was considered at the time to be an intellectual bombshell. The lecture's ostensible theme was that a binary division was growing between scientists and literary scholars, risking the loss of a common culture. What preoccupied Snow, a physicist and a novelist, was that the literary world knew too little about the scientific one. Fifty years later, in a world where both literary criticism and especially science are thriving, Snow's concern seems almost quaint. But I think his underlying concern is still relevant — we should not be so preoccupied with our own isolated interests that we become parochial solipsists. We are all diminished by what we don't know and we are all diminished by what others don't know.

That is why a good education is central. It is what makes us whole, as people and as countries. It gives us what we need for creating and maintaining a unified, generous, humane, economically viable, and empathetic common culture. And by pumping the necessary information and values into our democratic veins, it also helps prevent our civilizing arteries from getting clogged by intolerance, inequality and injustice. A good education narrows the gap between the rhetoric of opportunity and the reality, and offers its graduates that most important of commodities: hope.

So when children don't get the quality of education they deserve and need, it creates a moral deficit in our pursuit of a common culture. This can have tragic consequences not only for those children, but for all of us. Almost exactly 50 years after C. P. Snow worried about how unduly restrictive two of our cultures were, President Obama talked more searingly about how restrictive a poor education is for our culture, period. If children don't get the quality of education to which they're entitled, he said, it will be "untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy, and unacceptable for our children. . . . What is at stake is nothing less than the American dream".

Enter Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, this year's Bronfman Prize recipients. Fifteen years ago, themselves equipped with the best education possible, they loaded some passion and commitment into a new kind of educational package, wrapped it with tenacious optimism, and shlepped it all over the United States.

The result, as the Washington Post's Jay Mathews eloquently explains in his wonderful book, was a program called Knowledge is Power, whose acronym "KIPP" became immediately synonymous with innovative and transformative education. Almost 20,000 less advantaged children in 20 states, kids we had previously thought would not — and could not — take a seat in the front row of the American dream, were escorted down the aisle by KIPP, and shown how to take and
keep their seats.

KIPP didn't do it by replicating the pedagogical techniques that worked for those on intimate terms with their educational entitlements. What Dave Levin and Mike Feinberg did instead was breathtakingly singular. They understood how much harder learning was for those children who were pressing their noses to the windows of the economic and social mainstream, kids who despaired that they would never be allowed in, and convinced that even if they were, they couldn't compete. So Levin and Feinberg designed a whole new system to dismantle these seemingly insurmountable barriers.

They worked very hard to do it. And so did their remarkable teachers. And so, especially, did their eager and hopeful students. Very, very hard. From 7:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. every weekday, every other Saturday, and 3 weeks in the summer. This is not a Sentimental Education.

And yet it evokes in us a sentimentality about education. Flaubert said he wrote Sentimental Education to describe the moral history of his generation. KIPP is in the business of expanding what Martin Luther King called "the arc of the moral universe” by bending it towards a new kind of history for thousands of children in this generation, one that offers them a universe of endlessly unfolding possibilities.

By opening these children's minds to opportunities, choices and contributions neither they nor their families ever thought accessible, KIPP has given them — and the rest of us — a better chance at the kind of future we all dream of for everyone's children. Thank you, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, for the educational miracle your unique vision has given the world. On behalf of all the judges of the Bronfman Prize, it is an honour to be able to present you with this recognition for your exceptional and inspiring leadership.