Dear Chris,
There’s so much meat in your last dispatch that I scarcely know where to begin. I’m trying to resist rising like a fat carp to your tolerance of hemi-creationism in the schools of Kansas (if it’s OK to teach some kids creationism, then is it OK to teach some kids the more extreme versions of Afrocentric history, which is at least as closely based in fact as Adam’s rib?). But I was very struck by your smart formulation that the stakes rise on both sides, between progressives and traditionalists, the more you see schooling as a system that ought to offer some consistency between Alaska and Florida.
If you really believe in the traditional academic curriculum foremost, then it’s hard to see how you can get away from favoring at least national standards in education, if not federal control. There probably isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between us in the basic view that content-based education is the most important thing. But if that’s so, why have 50 or more local arguments about content, instead of one big conversation about what content is important? Perhaps the Department of Education shouldn’t mandate how science is taught, but I don’t see anything wrong with my tax dollars going toward DOE’s firmly asserting that evolution is the gold standard. National standards are of course hellishly difficult to arrive at and amazingly easy (as Lynne Cheney and Co. proved a few years back) to undermine. They’re just better than all the alternatives.
My own experience of schooling was, I now see, amazingly traditional. I had to memorize the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, and some of Evangeline in sixth grade. (Though I did have a teacher in 12th grade who had us all assemble a ritzy picnic–I seem to remember making cucumber sandwiches, with the crusts cut off–to emulate the “riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart” of which Nick Carraway speaks in The Great Gatsby.) I feel lucky to have had such an education.
As for Kozol: I love your word “baggy,” but thought it too kind by half. This book made me want to go out and kick a puppy.
It’s not that I share your disdain for Kozol’s ideology. “Segregated” strikes me as a fairly accurate way of describing a school system in which only two-tenths of 1 percent of the children are Caucasian. And it’s incontestable that, for example, the asthma that plagues Kozol’s young subjects stems in large part from the economic forces that surround them with more pollutants than the average child in New Rochelle.
No, for me, it’s just that Kozol is all wet. He writes so moistly about the precious innocence of his child interlocutors:
who have been so kind and generous to me, as they have been to many people who do nothing to deserve their loyalty and love, which aren’t for sale and never can be earned, and who, with bashful voices, tiny fingers, sometimes unintended humor, and wise hearts, illuminate the lives of everyone who knows them.
Blech. Never mind that he so sentimentalizes children, who deserve better. The real subject of this aimless book, as you point out, is the delicate sensibility of Jonathan Kozol. Who needs structure or destination in a journalistic narrative, when he is a fine enough person to notice the things that Kozol notices? I actually found the book, for all its faux humility and stagey simplicity, a little creepy. “I was in no hurry to impose much discipline or structure on the hours that we spent together or to steer our conversations in particular directions,” Kozol writes. “I didn’t truly know my own direction at the time. I only knew I liked to be with them and that the world felt safer in their company.”
The book is full of this tremulous first-person, which makes the whole effort seem emotionally opportunistic. About a woman named Eleanor, he writes, “She was a good friend for a person who allowed himself to get discouraged but had never found the kinds of resurrections that are made of steel and stone and slogans utterly convincing.” But not such a good friend that Kozol roused himself to find out what she died of in the course of his work on this book: Finding out might have involved doing some reporting.
See, I told you he brings out the sadist in me. So, let me identify one almost parenthetical virtue of Ordinary Resurrections: the way that adults (Kozol always refers to them as “grown-ups”) in Mott Haven affirm Ravitch’s message by describing their resentment at having been shunted into courses like cosmetology in high school. “Only the white girls took the college courses,” Eleanor tells Kozol. School administrators “led you to expect to clean the houses of the girls who went to college.”
Now, there’s material you can wrap your tiny fingers around.
Meanly,
Marjorie
