Left Back and Ordinary Resurrections

Dear Marjorie,

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Hearing the Paul Simon line "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school ...," I used to assume he shared my revulsion for what I was then going through in grade school. For me, crap was Venn diagrams, math in base eight, music instruction consisting of ta ... ta ... tee-tee ta chanted like a dirge by the mistress of some higher-up in the superintendent's department, Extemporaneous Speaking (why not a course in Working Up an Appetite for Lunch?), a course on Atlantis taught by some social-studies psychopath ... But Simon would probably have considered my curriculum great. I bet his idea of "crap" was stuff like memorizing dates and presidents.

Preferences in education probably stem from one's sense of one's own educational shortcomings. So, to declare my prejudices, I think content-based education is ultimately always preferable, even at the risk of rote-learning. Progressive elements can be introduced along the way, as both means and ends. Means: Handling tin and mercury and lead is an aid to memory--but use that memory to learn the Periodic Table. Ends: You should wind up loving French as a "whole language," but if you don't learn it in infancy, you'll need verb tables and spelling drills to do that.

Your questions--1) Does Ravitch think progressive education can ever work in public schools?; and 2) Is there a difference between her character education and utopianism?--arise because she sidesteps two big issues.

First are the equity complaints that have arisen in the 1990s. There are jurisdictions (is Vermont one?) that now equalize school budgets town-by-town or neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and forbid local residents to supplement them with bake sales, etc. The argument is over whether it's ethical for Greenwich to have $20,000 per student while Bridgeport subsists on $8,000 (or whatever). If the answer is yes, Greenwich can succeed with a progressive school. Maybe Bridgeport can, too, but it probably won't try. If the answer is no, schools will certainly converge in curricula.

Second is the libertarian/authoritarian question of how much local control one wants to grant, regardless of whether one goes in for equalization schemes. Should a big school in Kansas be allowed to split into a creationism-teaching section and an evolution-teaching section? (I say probably.) Should Kansas be allowed to mandate creationism in all schools? (No.) Should the Department of Education mandate evolutionism in all schools? (No.)

Again, the more federal control, the more convergence. Ravitch seems to like, or, at least countenance, this convergence. In a way that puts her more in line with progressives than traditionalists, Ravitch really feels the romance of the American School System. If you feel that way, then the difference between traditionalists and progressives is a battle to the death.

Ravitch's character education is extremely different from the progressives' Utopianism. But it's an ideological difference. As we've said, it's not Ravitch's style to snicker at campesino studies, etc. Still, her discussion of two different strains of multiculturalism makes it clear where she stands. She applauds cultural pluralism as an American social reality; she condemns ethnocentrism as a radical project. Character education is about reinforcing shared values. Utopianism is about propagandizing rising generations.

******

Jonathan Kozol was a Utopian. His Death at an Early Age (1967) described racial inequity in the Boston school system and helped lead to forced busing, an educational catastrophe that wound up deepening segregation into the bargain. I've never read Death, but I approached his new book with distrust.

Ordinary Resurrections is Kozol's description of a few years spent dropping in on children at the Episcopalian Church of St. Ann's, which has a Liberation Theology-style woman priest, in Mott Haven, a poor, black-and-Hispanic part of the Bronx. A quarter of them have fathers in prison, and many have relatives dead of AIDS. While the book bills itself as a study of youngsters' spirituality, Kozol claims most educational books are "disguised confessionals," to use his friend John Holt's phrase, and says he's writing one. But he doesn't seem to know the difference between a confessional and a journal. This is a journal--on his tours of Bronx grade schools, his father's death, his early days teaching in radical schools in Boston, his current impatience with ideological combat, his friendship with Dr. Ruth Westheimer, his dog, his ability to elicit children's fantasies--a baggy, slapdash book whose organizational principle is Jonathan Kozol himself.

I'm put off by Kozol's ideology: his conspiracy theorizing ("There are a number of ways to break the will of those who have a fleeting notion of escaping from the destinies a social order seems to have in store for them."); his equation of Northern poverty (a circumstance) with Jim Crow (a regime); his description of Mott Haven, a neighborhood with large populations drawn from about 20 different countries, as "segregated"; his implication that the Christian doctrine of everyone being equal in the eyes of God is hypocrisy unless everyone has exactly the same amount of money.

But I'm more offended by the smarmy pomposity of the prose: "Innocence cannot stop bullets. It cannot eradicate disease. It can't put books and well-paid teachers into underfunded schools. But innocence has power." This is a sort of bullying, an enlisting of really unfortunate kids to serve as the literary-critical equivalent of human shields. Kozol surrounds himself with children who display an "automatic and instinctive kindness" even in face of drugs, shootings, and broken families in hopes that we won't ask a) why we should be surprised by this, or b) what the kids have to do with the real subject of this brag-fest.

Best,
Chris

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This week, our Book Clubbers discuss Diane Ravitch's Left Back and Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary Resurrections. Ravitch's book critiques a century's worth of school reforms, arguing that reform has dumbed schools down instead of strengthening them. Kozol's book is an extended look at one group of children in the South Bronx and their "little miracles of stubbornly persistent innocence." Click here to buy Ravitch's book, here to buy Kozol's, and here for an explanation of Slate's new and improved Book Club format. Click here to read this discussion from the beginning.

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