Bill Ayers

New Blog Posted

2008-09-26T11:35:00.002-05:00

Thank you all for reading my posts over the last several years, I have moved my blog to a new address.

You may access it at:

www.billayers.org

Ann Lynn Lopez Schubert, 1952-2006

2006-12-09T15:56:00.001-06:00

Ann Schubert died in Chicago on December 2,2006 after a long illness--- her life-long love and devoted partner, Bill Schubert, and their two children, Heidi and Henry Lopez Schubert, were by her side.

Ann earned her Ph.D at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993. She concluded her stunning dissertation with these words: "Nearly fifteen years ago, before our two children were born, my husband and I wrote that in order for education to be genuinely for children or anyone, it also had to be of and by them. By this I mean that students must be involved in authentic ways in the conceptualization of purpose, method and evaluation of consequences---the whole process of education. While it seems clear from my own experiences that the more formal the system of education the less education centers on meaning and sense of direction or purpose, there exist possibilities to create occasions for such learning through study of supportive and resistive factors, study of the environment and its history, ongoing dialogue with one's students, subversion, creativity, sheer determination, trust, courage, and love."

That's Ann, pure and straight-forward.

Ann's inquiry explored the possibility of employing progressive approaches in a city school, a dance class, and a unique home education project. It's an original and ground-breaking narrative study, focused on the deep meaning-making perspectives of participants. She writes: "urban...schools are experienced...as places of value, diversity, freedom, possibility, and complexity rather than barren wastelands of filth' corruption, decay, and vice...Until we learn to value the idea of the city,we can expect to see the streets paved with anger..."

Ann continues to teach me in ways subtle and surprising---- her words enlighten me and her life emboldens me.

I miss her very much.

World Education Forum

2006-11-24T13:06:00.000-06:00

World Education Forum

2006-11-07T13:35:00.000-06:00

WORLD EDUCATION FORUM.

Centro Interncional Miranda

Caracas, Venezuela

November , 2006

President Hugo Chavez, Vice-President Vicente Rangel, Ministers Moncada and Isturiz, invited guests,comrades. I’m honored and humbled to be here with you this morning. I bring greetings and support from your brothers and sisters throughout Northamerica. Welcome to the World Education Forum! Amamos la revolucion Bolivariana!

This is my fourth visit to Venezuela, each time at the invitation of my comrade and friend Luis Bonilla, a brilliant educator and inspiring fighter for justice. Luis has taught me a great deal about the Bolivarian Revolution and about the profound educational reforms underway here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chavez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution, and I’ve come to appreciate Luis as a major asset in both the Venezuelan and the international struggle---I look forward to seeing how he and all of you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane. Thank you, Luis, for everything you’ve done.

I also thank my youngest son, Chesa Boudin, who is interpreting my talk this morning and whose book on the Bolivarian revolution has played an important part in countering the barrage of lies spread by the U.S. State Department and the corrupted Northamerican media.

On my last trip to Caracas I spoke of traveling to a literacy class—Mission Robinson— in the hills above the city along a long and winding road. As we made our way higher and higher, the talk turned to politics as it inevitably does here, and someone noted that the wealthy—here and everywhere, here and in the US surely—have certain received opinions, a kind of absolute judgment about poor and working people, and yet they have never traveled this road, nor any road like it. They have never boarded this bus up into these hills, and not just the oligarchy or the wealthy—this lack of first-hand knowledge, of open investigation, of generous regard is also a condition of the everyday liberals, and even many of the radicals and armchair intellectuals whose formulations sit lifeless and stifling in a crypt of mythology about poor people. Everyone should come and travel these roads into the hills, we agreed then—and not just once, but again and again and again – if they will ever learn anything of the real conditions of life here, surely, but more important than that, if they will ever encounter the wisdom and experience and insight that lives here as well.

We arrived at eight o'clock to a literacy circle already underway being conducted in a small, poorly-lit classroom. And here in an odd and dark space, a sun was shining: ten people had pulled their chairs close together—a young woman maybe 19, a grandmother maybe 65, two men in their 40s—each struggling to read. And I thought of a poem called A Poor Woman Learns to Write by Margaret Atwood about a woman working laboriously to print her name in the dirt. She never thought she could do it, the poet notes, not her-- this writing business was for others. But she does it, prints her name, her first word so far, and she looks up and smiles--- for she did it right.

The woman in the poem—just like the students in Mission Robinson—is living out a universal dialectic that embodies education at its very best: she wrote her name, she changed herself, and she altered the conditions of her life. As she wrote the word, she changed the world, and another world became—suddenly and surprisingly—possible.

I began teaching when I was 20 years old in a small freedom school affiliated with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. The year was 1965, and I'd been arrested in a demonstration. Jailed for ten days, I met several activists who were finding ways to link teaching and education with deep and fundamental social change. They were following Dewey and DuBois, King and Helen Keller who wrote: “We can’t have education without revolution. We have tried peace education for 1,900 years and it has failed. Let us try revolution and see what it will do now.”

I walked out of jail and into my first teaching position—and from that day until this I've thought of myself as a teacher, but I've also understood teaching as a project intimately connected with social justice. After all, the fundamental message of the teacher is this: you can change your life—whoever you are, wherever you've been, whatever you've done, another world is possible. As students and teachers begin to see themselves as linked to one another, as tied to history and capable of collective action, the fundamental message of teaching shifts slightly, and becomes broader, more generous: we must change ourselves as we come together to change the world. Teaching invites transformations, it urges revolutions small and large. La educacion es revolucion!

I taught at first in something like a Simoncito---called Head Start---and eventually taught at every level in barrios and prisons and insurgent projects across the United States. I learned then that education is never neutral. It always has a value, a position, a politics. Education either reinforces or challenges the existing social order, and school is always a contested space – what should be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom? At bottom, it involves a struggle over the essential questions: what does it mean to be a human being living in a human society?

Totalitarianism demands obedience and conformity, hierarchy, command and control. Royalty requires allegiance. Capitalism promotes racism and militarism – turning people into consumers, not citizens. Participatory democracy, by contrast, requires free people coming together voluntarily as equals who are capable of both self-realization and, at the same time, full participation in a shared political and economic life.

Education contributes to human liberation to the extent that people reflect on their lives, and, becoming more conscious, insert themselves as subjects in history. To be a good teacher means above all to have faith in the people, to believe in the possibility that people can create and change things. Education is not preparation for life, but rather education is life itself ,an active process in which everyone--- students and teachers-- participates as co-learners.

Despite being under constant attack from within and from abroad, the Bolivarian revolution has made astonishing strides in a brief period: from the Mission Simoncito to the Mission Robinson to the Mission Ribas to the Mission Sucre, to the Bolivarian schools and the UBV, Venezuelans have shown the world that with full participation, full inclusion, and popular empowerment, the failings of capitalist schooling can be resisted and overcome. Venezuela is a beacon to the world in its accomplishment of eliminating illiteracy in record time, and engaging virtually the entire population in the ongoing project of education.

The great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote a poem to his fellow writers called “The Poet’s Obligation” in which he instructed them in their core responsibility: you must, he said, become aware of your sisters and brothers who are trapped in subjugation and meaninglessness, imprisoned in ignorance and despair. You must move in and out of windows carrying a vision of the vast oceans just beyond the bars of the prison-- a message of hope and possibility. Neruda ends with this: it is through me that freedom and the sea will call in answer to the shrouded heart.

Let those of us who are gathered here today read this poem as “The Teacher’s Obligation.” We, too, must move in and out of windows, we, too, must build a project of radical imagination and fundamental change. Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education– a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation. This World Education Forum provides us a unique opportunity to develop and share the lessons and challenges of this profound educational project that is the Bolivarian Revolution.

Viva Mission Sucre!
Viva Presidente Chavez!
Viva La Revolucion Bolivariana!
Hasta La Victoria Siempre!

A Visit to Champaign-Urbana

2006-11-07T13:32:00.000-06:00

October, 2006

To Daniel and the Energetic, Wondrous, and Hopeful Early Childhood Education Students:

That was fast! Zoom! Zoom! I was back in Chicago at 4:30, but sorry to leave so abruptly. Next time I’ll stay.
I think I answered a few of your question—3? 4?—but didn’t get to most. So here goes:
1) On discipline and classroom management: Try hard to create a classroom culture that is purposeful, varied, engaging, fair. Try to have a range of relevant activities available. Try to have materials that people can use without much external direction and assistance. Every day ask: Is the classroom engaging? For everyone? Is the pace and sequence and rhythm of the day appropriate?
Get this right (and it’s never perfect, but rather always a work-in-progress) and lots of behavioral stuff will take care of itself. But ok, people mess up. When someone does, that’s not an occasion for anger or shock, but rather, it’s the occasion for a “teachable moment”—a time to talk about why we use words and not fists, or why that hurt her feelings, or why…
The repertoire in too many schools is narrow, and runs from humiliation to exclusion. Promise yourself that you’ll never humiliate a student, and that you seriously, truly do not want to exclude anyone. We strive for the dignity of each in an inclusive community. Try to live up to that promise.
2) Alternative assessment: All this means is that teachers make judgments and assessments all the time, and you should search for ways to understand your students that go deeper than a score on a test. You should build a system to collect, save, and display student work—massive amounts of it. You should interview each kid regularly—at least once a month and often informally—to get a feel for how each is experiencing class. You should help each articulate goals and agendas. And you should keep observational notes (observe kids at work at least 15 minutes morning, and 15 minutes afternoon) on the class, review them regularly, and see who you’re missing. You can ask focusing questions to help you observe: Why have I not seen Maria in my notes for several weeks? When is Hector more engaged?
3) Starting with strengths: This is the challenge—to see human capacity in an environment that surfaces weaknesses. In a prison, toughness is visible; in too many classrooms there bad behavior is visible. Build a space with multiple entry-points and several pathways to success. I know an extraordinary prison (it’s true!) where writers’ workshops reveal the poet inside the thugish exterior, the gardener inside the felon. If they can do it, you—with a class of six-year-olds—can do it too.
4) Avoid burnout: Create provisions for Teacher Talk, a professional conversation where you can get support and ideas (see To Teach). Do things at your own adult level that you advocate and want your kids to do: read good books, eat well, sleep at night, be an involved citizen in some civic organization, make art, exercise. Being able to notice that the world is crazy doesn’t make you sane; resisting the madness actively, opposing things that offend your humanity is the path to balance.
5) Favorite teachers: I’ve loved so many—Miss Erickson in kindergarten because she was “nice” and she told marvelous stories and she loved me; Mr. Ainsworth, my gay high school math teacher, because he had two little dogs named “Trig” and “Geo” who came to class with him, and because he liked us; Professor Mayer because he challenged me to think deeply about the world and he liked us; Maxine Greene because she blew my mind, and she liked us.
Here’s the pattern: memorable teachers come to teach, and they embrace their students’ humanity—they like us.
6) I included “Everything I Needed to Know…” because it was just new when I published my first book—it wasn’t yet a cliché—and because it contains an essential truth: the deep and mysterious lessons are available to human beings from the start. Everything else is just elaboration.
7) As you teach, you learn. I’ve learned so much, mostly specific and local—Darryl loves to sing left to himself, Hannah gets disruptive when she’s hungry, Angel can work hard early but tires easily. Sometimes I’ve learned about myself—I need to read more in this or that area; I need to be more directive and less laid-back; I have trouble being patient with whiny people. Sometimes I’ve learned from students about huge (but invisible to me) parts of the world—illegal immigrants, alcoholism and anorexia, homelessness, gambling, workers at the race track. One thing I know: follow any human being two steps into her or his lived life and world, and all the received wisdom, easy assumptions, clichés, and stereotypes fall away. Each of us is an entire universe, the one and only who will ever trod this earth, a work-in-progress and an unruly spark of meaning-making energy on a voyage toward infinity. How great is that?
8) There’s more, of course. See www.billayers.org if you like. Peace!

In Defense of Poetry....A Letter to the NYT, October, 2002

2006-10-29T08:04:00.000-06:00

To The Editors:

The logic and structure of good journalism are poorly fitted for poetry. Spreading myths and printing falsehoods may violate the standards of a decent newspaper but they are the very stuff of poetry, and that's why no one with an ounce of sense goes to Homer or Neruda or Schymborska or Bob Dylan for the facts. When you instruct your readers that the "proper response" to reading Amiri Baraka is "discussion and condemnation" you both confuse the register of poetry, and you beg the question. The great Chicago poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, once asked, "Does man love Art?" Her response: "Man visits art but squirms. Art hurts. Art urges voyages."

William Ayers

October 2, 2002

A Letter to the Times Found Five Years Later...

2006-09-26T16:40:00.000-05:00

September 15, 2001

To The Editors—

In July of this year Dinitia Smith asked my publisher if she might
interview me for the New York Times on my forthcoming book, Fugitive
Days. From the start she questioned me sharply about bombings, and
each time I referred her to my memoir where I discussed the culture of
violence we all live with in America, my growing anger in the 1960's
about the structures of racism and the escalating war, and the
complex, sometimes extreme and despairing choices I made in those
terrible times.
Smith's angle is captured in the Times headline: "No regrets for a
love of explosives" (September 11, 2001). She and I spoke a lot about
regrets, about loss, about attempts to account for one's life. I
never said I had any love for explosives, and anyone who knows me
found that headline sensationalistic nonsense. I said I had a
thousand regrets, but no regrets for opposing the war with every ounce
of my strength. I told her that in light of the indiscriminate murder
of millions of Vietnamese, we showed remarkable restraint, and that
while we tried to sound a piercing alarm in those years, in fact we
didn't do enough to stop the war.
Smith writes of me: "Even today, he 'finds a certain eloquence to
bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a safe distance,' he writes." This
fragment seems to support her "love affair with bombs" thesis, but it
is the opposite of what I wrote:

We'll bomb them into the Stone Age, an unhinged American politician
had intoned, echoing a gung-ho, shoot-from-the-hip general… each
describing an American policy rarely spoken so plainly. Boom. Boom.
Boom. Poor Viet Nam.
Almost four times the destructive power Florida… How could we
understand it? How could we take it in? Most important, what should
we do about it? Bombs away.
There is a certain eloquence to bombs, a poetry and a pattern from a
safe distance. The rhythm of B-52s dropping bombs over Viet Nam, a
deceptive calm at 40,000 feet as the doors ease open and millennial
eggs are delivered on the green canopy below, the relentless thud of
indiscriminate destruction and death without pause on the ground.
Nothing subtle or syncopated. Not a happy rhythm.
Three million Vietnamese lives were extinguished. Dig up Florida and
throw it into the ocean. Annihilate Chicago or London or Bonn. Three
million—each with a mother and a father, a distinct name, a mind and a
body and a spirit, someone who knew him well or cared for her or
counted on her for something or was annoyed or burdened or irritated
by him; each knew something of joy or sadness or beauty or pain. Each
was ripped out of this world, a little red dampness staining the
earth, drying up, fading, and gone. Bodies torn apart, blown away,
smudged out, lost forever.

I wrote about Vietnamese lives as a personal American responsibility,
then, and the hypocrisy of claiming an American innocence as we
constructed and stoked an intricate and hideous chamber of death in
Asia.
Clearly I wrote and spoke about he export of violence and the
government's love affair with bombs. Just as clearly Dinitia Smith
was interested in her journalistic angle and not the truth. This is
not a question of being misunderstood or "taken out of context," but
of deliberate distortion.
Some readers apparently responded to her piece, published on the same
day as the vicious terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, by
associating my book with them. This is absurd. My memoir is from
start to finish a condemnation of terrorism, of the indiscriminate
murder of human beings, whether driven by fanaticism or official
policy. It begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of
age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia. My book criticizes the
American obsession with a clean and distanced violence, and the
culture of thoughtlessness and carelessness that results form it.
We are now witnessing crimes against humanity in our own land on an
unthinkable scale, and I fear that we might soon see innocent people
in other parts of the world as well as in the U.S. dying and suffering
in response.
All that we witnessed September 11—the awful carnage and pain, the
heroism of ordinary people—may drive us mad with grief and anger, or
it may open us to hope in new ways. Perhaps precisely because we have
suffered we can embrace the suffering of others and gather the
necessary wisdom to resist the impulse to lash out randomly. The
lessons of the anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s may be more
urgent now than ever.

Bill Ayers
Chicago, IL

ISRAEL INVADES!!! (the NY public schools)

2006-09-21T22:10:00.000-05:00

Outrageous.

Two years ago Joel Klein, Chancellor of the NY public schools, bowed
to a heated and disingenuous attack by a group of zealots against any
American academic who had the temerity to deviate from Israel's
elaborate,self-aggrandizing, and thoroughly dishonest story of itself,
and announced that Rashid Khalidi, the esteemed historian from
Columbia University, would not be allowed to speak at school-sponsored
teacher development sessions. Klein in effect scuttled a program in
which Columbia provided, pro bono, academics from a range of
disciplines to engage with teachers in staff development activities.

Fast forward to September,2006---five years after 911. The New York
City Council's education committee approved a curriculum that will
grant graduate credit to teachers who take a 30-hour course of study
on Israel, written by the pr department of the Israeli Consulate.
Consul General Aryeh Mekel understood the import of this unprecedented
initiative: "through the teachers a generation of leaders will be
educated to maintain the special relations between the US and
Israel....We are not bringing politics, but are exposing them to
Israel as we know it and as we would like people to know it." But no
politics? Impossible.

Education is about asking questions, seeking the truth, challenging
dogma and convention, pursuing evidence, opening doors, upending
received wisdom. The City Council is promoting blatant propaganda,and
it should be resisted with the power of real education.

911----Plus Five

2006-09-21T11:09:00.000-05:00

I'm writing these words on September 12, 2006--- the fifth
anniversary of the spectacular hijacking of the monstrous crimes of
September 11. That's right, the hijacking of the hijackings, carried
out in plain sight by a different band of right-wing zealots just as
determined to impose their arid ideology on America and the world as
the thugs of 9-11. It's a hijacking still underway, a work-in-progress
whose disastrous consequences are only partly apparent. But let's
start at the beginning, and remember how we got into this fine mess.

The attacks of September 11 were--- no doubt about it--- pure
terrorism, indiscriminate slaughter, crimes against humanity carried
out by reactionary fanatics with fundamentalist fantasies dancing
wildly in their heads. And in the immediate aftermath Americans
experienced, of course, grief, confusion, compassion, solidarity, as
well as something else: uncharacteristic soul-searching, questioning,
and political openness, but not for long.

A headline in the Onion got it only partly right: "Unsure What to
Do, Entire Country Stares Dumbly at Hands." Actually Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Ashcroft, and their gang knew exactly what to do, and they did it---
they pulled out their most ambitious plans to create a new American
empire, to remake the world to their liking, to suppress dissent, to
bail out the airlines by transferring $20 billion without safeguards
or benchmarks from public to private hands in a matter of days with a
single no-vote in the Senate, to scuttle aspects of the law that
checked their power, to deliver the country, in the words of Arthur
Miller, "into the hands of the radical right, a ministry of free
floating apprehension toward anything that never happens in the middle
of Missouri." The ideologues filled up all the available space with
their fantastic interpretation of events, and they shouted down anyone
with the temerity to disagree, donning the mantle of patriotism to
defend their every move.

The "Boondocks" and Bill Maher came under steady attack, Susan
Sontag and Edward Said were told to shut up, give up their jobs, and
by implication to retreat to their caves with their terrorist
soul-mates. When mild-mannered, slightly right wing Stanley Fish
suggested that all the mantras of the day--- we have seen the face of
evil, the clash of civilizations, we're at war with international
terrorism--- are inaccurate and unhelpful, failing for a lack of any
available mechanism for settling deep-seated disputes, he was targeted
as a destructive leech on the American way of life. Asked to apologize
for his post-modern devil work of forty years, he cracked wise,
telling me he could picture the headline: "Fish ironically announces
the death of post-modernism, millions cheer."

The president said repeatedly that America was misunderstood in the
world, and that what we have here is mainly a failure to communicate.
He sounded like the sadistic warden of the prison plantation in "Cool
Hand Luke," whose signature phrase is the focus of ridicule and
reversal. What's clear in both cases is that a failure to communicate
is the very least of it.
The press rolled over, gave up any pretense of skepticism, and
became the idiot-chorus for the powerful. When the president looked
soulfully out from our TVs and implored every American child to send a
dollar for Afghan kids, no one asked how much money would be required
to feed those kids, or how the food was going to get there and by-pass
their parents. Starvation ahead. The so-called war on terror was
simply accepted on all sides, no one qualifying with the necessary,
"so-called." No one asked whether a crime didn't require a criminal
justice response and solution---perhaps a massive response, but within
the field of criminal justice nonetheless. No one in power asked what
the field of this war would be, or how we would know if we'd won. No
one demanded evidence or proof.

And here we are: international law shredded, torture defended,
citizens rounded up and held without honoring their Constitutional
rights, nationalism promoted relentlessly, disdain for human rights on
the rise, militarism ascendant in all aspects of the culture, the mass
media flat on its back, people nodding dully as we accede to an orange
alert and march in orderly lines through security checkpoints and
random searches, organized vote suppression and rampant fraud at the
polls, mass incarceration of Black men, war without end, and on and
on.

Five years after, we might stir ourselves to impeach the criminal
heading up this cabal, we might prepare for the criminal trials these
domestic hijackers deserve, and, at the very least, we might tell the
truth in the public square and thereby contribute to building a mass
movement for peace and justice.

Curiouser and Curiouser (this is the next go around to the immeditely prior post)

2006-09-07T09:05:00.000-05:00

CURIOUSER and CURIOUSER

Another go-round. The thinking gets twistier.
My son reminded me that Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founder of the
ACLU, was expelled from that organization because of her membership in
the CP. Others have sent me wonderful (and quite radical) statements
from John Dewey himself. A favorite anecdote: When Maxim Gorky was
in New York in 1905, he was refused lodging at several hotels because
he was traveling with a woman not his wife. The Deweys "invited the
couple to their home," and hosted a reception for students "in honor
of the non-Mrs. Gorky."

Dear Bill,

I take full responsibility for being the one who cannot invite you,
but you mistake me if you infer therefore that I think of education
ever as an apolitical endeavor. The politics of what we are doing
here is keenly felt. I embrace having our efforts identified with
radicalism, but I am opposed to the claim that violence should be part
of the solution. Civil disobedience means challenging and even
provoking authority, but it is conscientiously non violent. I am
sorry to be drawn into what seems like a very prissy judgment about
you and your past. It's not about whether you have paid your debt to
society. My primary concern is that your celebrated recent book and
"I regret none of it stance" not become the banner for our School of
Education.
I'm sorry if our letter was either hurtful or annoying, since as you
say we had no need to inform you of our non-invitation. Perhaps it
will seem less self-important or weasely if you imagine [your friends]
holding my feet to the fire, making us explain our decision, and
certainly not taking the easier, silent course of action.

"Lauren"

Dear Lauren,

I admire your opposition "to the claim that violence should be part of
the solution". I make no such claim myself, and believe, in fact, that
non-violent resistance is preferable whenever possible. Of course your
opposition puts you into direct conflict with your own government, the
greatest purveyor of violence on earth, as Martin Luther King, Jr.
noted more than once. We live in fact in a sewer of violence, often
exported, always rationalized and hidden through mystification and the
frenzied use of bread-and-circuses. If endorsing your opposition is
the oath that must be spoken in order to attend your conference or to
come to your School of Education---and I don't think it should be---
consider the exclusions: both of your US Senators, the president and
his cabinet, the liberal head of the New School and the reactionary
front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination (both of whom
committed war crimes that they've refused to account for), military
recruiters, of course, and anyone not a pacifist, and, oh, don't
forget Nelson Mandela--- he wasn't in prison all those years only for
civil disobedience.

I've never claimed that my actions were superior to yours, for
example--- actually, I'm not sure what specifically you participated
in then or now, but I know folks who built counter-institutions,
organized in factories, emigrated to Africa or Europe to get away from
the madness for awhile, built communes and collectives, fought for a
peace-and-justice platform inside the Democratic Party, and a lot
else. I don't think all of it was brilliant or perfect, of course, but
nor was it entirely stupid. I've said repeatedly that no one with eyes
even slightly open can reach the age of sixty and not have countless
regrets, and I have my share, but I can't think of a single action I
took against the government and its murderous assault in Southeast
Asia that I regret. Perhaps you can point to something in particular
that you think I should regret, and then apologize for. I'd consider
it. But I certainly don't denigrate non-violent resistance---I've
admired and participated in direct action for forty years, most
recently last week.

I've taught at UIC for twenty years, and I don't think anyone here
considers either my presence or any of my writings emblematic. I've
given several commencement addresses--- one at a school just down the
road from you--- and countless lectures--- two at your university---
and again, I doubt that anyone thought that I'd left a banner---
perhaps not even an impression. I can't imagine what forces would have
to come together to make Fugitive Days "the banner" for your School of
Education. Is anyone proposing such a thing? It seems utterly
preposterous, but it raises a question: are all scholars and educators
who might attend your gathering being scrutinized by the same standard
to determine whether their writings might inadvertently become your
banner?

If I'm as radioactive as you seem to think--- so contaminating that
simply being around me is a threat to the good people--- maybe you
should spread the alarm to my dean, my university, my publishers, the
organizers of the dozens of events I've been asked to address in the
next several months. You won't be the first, of course--- you'll be
joining a campaign already underway, fueled by David Horowitz, Sol
Stern, Chester Finn, and more.

Your choice to exclude me is neither here nor there, and I don't take
it personally. Please don't take my response personally either---I
really have no idea about your politics or your commitments or your
activities or your projects, and I'm willing to assume for now that in
your work and in your life you stand steadfastly for humanism,
progressivism, peace and justice.

Sincerely,
Bill

Love Me, I'm a Liberal

2006-09-01T18:17:00.000-05:00

Upon returning from summer break I found a surprising letter awaiting
me written by three colleagues from another university, two of whom
I'd known and worked with for decades. The letter simultaneously
informed me about a conference my friends were organizing and
explained--- with some anguish I think--- that I would not be welcome
there.
They note that we're living in troubled times, that calculated
appeals to fear rule the day, and that they hope to counter all of
that. Ironically, fear is stamped all over the letter.
I'm reminded of when Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were hauled
before the fearsome House Committee on Un-American Activities, refused
to bow, and helped to laugh it out of existence. Or when the
universities were cowed by a bullying government into banning the
DuBois Clubs--- a handful of students in the youth-wing of the CP who
were attacked by Richard Nixon for intentionally creating a front
group that would dupe people because it rhymed with the Boys Clubs---
and we members of Students for a Democratic Society signed up en masse
and swelled their membership a hundred-fold.
I find myself sitting here humming Phil Ochs' brilliant "Love Me,
I'm a Liberal".
Different times demand different responses of course, but to claim
the mantle of 'social justice' while practicing this kind of exclusion
is unacceptable.
Their letter to me and my response to them are reproduced below.
I've edited out identifiable references to my colleagues in order to
protect the…well, you decide, let's just say their privacy. I can be
reached at billayers.org, or bayers@uic.edu. Onward!

William Ayers
Distinguished Professor
University of Illinois at Chicago
Dear Bill,

This is an unusual letter for us to be writing and for you to receive.
We count you among the most noted progressive educators in the
country with a deep commitment to teaching for social justice. Yet,
after extended deliberation and discussion, we find ourselves in a
real quandary. Because of current…times, we cannot invite you to an
event we are planning for progressive educators. Because we know and
deeply respect you and your commitment to teaching for social justice,
we felt that an explanation was in order.

Next spring, we will host an event…to honor Bob Moses and progressive
education. Bob is to receive the…John Dewey Prize for Progressive
Education. This prize is… "to honor significant achievement in
progressive education for the purpose of making society more just."
In an era of increasing standardization and heightened inequities, we
want to shine a bright light on the ideals of progressive education
and remind the public that there is another model for education that
attends well to the needs of every child. It is our intention to
invite other progressive educators to this convening and to create a
significant news and media event honoring the ideals of progressive
education [and] the work of Bob Moses…

It is because of our commitment to educate the public and to undertake
what is primarily a symbolic project that we cannot risk a simplistic
and dubious association between progressive education and the violent
aspects of your past. We believe, of course, in your right to express
your views, then and now. This is not about curtailing your
expression. Rather, in this age when Google summarizes instantly, and
often shallowly, who we are, it is about trying to say as clearly as
possible what we are arguing for. If we, as educators, want to engage
the learner, in this case the public, where they are, then we have to
find ways for the public to see progressive education not as radical
or threatening but as nurturing and familiar, connected to the very
best aspects of their own learning experiences. For the last five
years local and regional news organizations have taken the
"liberal"…faculty…to task. It is an environment that we have
challenged when key principles were involved, defending and
maintaining our…commitment to social justice against the state
bureaucracy. This event, however, is a celebration honoring two
educators' accomplishments and positively promoting progressive
education. We don't want a shallow press to prevail. We want to
engage the public with as little interference as possible.

One major reason for presenting a prize at this time is that
progressivism, and progressive education in particular, have been
greatly weakened by a broad and calculated appeal to our fears in this
changing world. We want to reinsert into the civil dialogue that
progressive education stands upon its proven record and can be a
viable alternative when our mood turns away from fears and towards
hopes. First, we need to get ourselves back to the table, and then
position ourselves as polite in our discourse before celebrating the
breadth of expression within progressive education. Coming from
behind may well demand such strategic thinking, whether is satisfies
all of our passion or not.

We hope this letter finds you well and that you understand and
possibly appreciate this decision.

Sincerely,
"Lauren" and the organizers

August 29, 2006

Dear Lauren,

You have, of course, no obligation to include me in the
progressive education conference you're organizing, certainly not in
your deliberations about my suitability to attend. I'm tempted to
say, with apologies to Groucho Marx, that I wouldn't want to attend
any progressive education conference that would have me.
Chances are I'd have never heard of the conference had you not
written, and in any case wouldn't have given a second thought to my
presence on or absence from the guest list. But since you've opened
this in the way you have, since you've outlined your thinking on the
matter and invited me to understand and possibly appreciate your
decision, I feel I must respond.
Your hope to position progressive education "not as radical or
threatening but as nurturing and familiar," is in some ways a fool's
errand. Of course, no one argues that the progressive movement should
threaten students or teachers or citizens—progressive education does
indeed hold the hope of realizing a humane and decent education for
all within a revitalized politics and a more authentically democratic
society. But progressive education, if it means anything at all, must
embody a profound threat to the status quo. It is a direct challenge,
for example, to all the policy initiatives that deskill and hammer
teachers into interchangeable cogs in a bureaucracy, all the pressure
to reduce teaching to a set of manageable and easily monitored tasks,
all the imposition of labels and all the simple-minded metrics
employed to describe student learning and rank youngsters in a
hierarchy of winners and losers. It's a threat to all that, and more.
But here we face a contradiction at the heart of our efforts: the
humanistic ideal and the democratic injunction tell us that every
person is an entire universe, that each can develop as a full and
autonomous person engaged with others in a common polity and an
equality of power; the capitalist imperative insists that profit is at
the center of economic, political, and social progress, and develops,
then, a culture of competition, elitism, and hierarchy. An education
for democracy fails as an adjunct to capitalism just as an education
for capitalism fails to build either a democratic ethos or a
participatory practice. We must engage, then, in the arena of school
and education reform as we struggle toward a world fit for all
children--- a place of peace and justice, joy and balance. The two are
inseparable.
And so I believe that progressive education must be part of a radical
movement if it is to be worthy of the hopes and dreams of those who
fight to bring humanistic alternatives to life. I mean radical in the
sense that Ella Baker, one of the unsung mothers of the Civil Rights
Movement, used the word. She called herself a radical, and she
explained that radical meant "going to the root." Little reforms here
and there never add up unless we get to the core of the problems we
face, she argued, analyze our situations, connect the struggles as we
work for more fundamental change.
Charlie Cobb, who co-wrote Radical Equations, was also the author of
the original proposal for Freedom Schools in the South more than forty
years ago. The brief he wrote claimed that while Black children were
denied many things—decent school facilities, honest and
forward-looking curriculum, fully qualified teachers—the fundamental
injury was "a complete absence of academic freedom, and students are
forced to live in an environment that is geared to squashing
intellectual curiosity, and different thinking." Cobb called the
classrooms of Mississippi "intellectual wastelands," and he challenged
himself and others "to fill an intellectual and creative vacuum," and
to encourage people "to articulate their own desires, demands and
questions." He was urging students to confront the circumstances of
their lives, to wonder about how they got to where they were, and to
think of how they might change things. He was crossing hard lines of
propriety and tradition, convention and common sense, of course,
poised to break the law and overthrow a system. His proposal was
designed to plow a deep and promising furrow toward the new--- more
than radical, this was insurrection itself, progressive education
linked to radical politics.
Of course, we are required now to make our own contributions in our
own time and place; the pathway, the content, and the curriculum must
be of, by and for this moment and this community. We might take
inspiration and attitude, sustenance and stance from the Mississippi
experience, but only as an orientation toward launch, toward imagining
and trying to bring to life something entirely new.
Finally, you refer to "the violent aspects" of my past. As you know
I've written extensively about politics and protest as well as my own
involvements, about the dual responsibilities to act and to doubt, and
about the impossibility of claiming a high moral stance while sitting
on the sidelines. I've accounted for my actions during the US
assaults on Vietnam and against the Black Freedom Movement—which is
what I assume you're referring to—and paid the price asked of me by
the legal system. And I've said often that our society ought to
engage in a truth-and-reconciliation process concerning those terrible
and wondrous times; in other words, I'm happy to stand up, tell my
story, admit my mistakes, and take responsibility—shoulder-to-shoulder
with everyone else, including war criminals, politicians, soldiers,
officers, frat boys, students, scholars, citizens. Absent that, you
seem to say that I have some uniquely dreadful behavior to account
for, and I politely disagree.
I worry that you're imagining a progressivism divorced from politics,
the larger world, and any real hope of transformation—a timid, tepid,
soft and servile thing. And I worry that your attempt to cleanse your
conference of the likes of me has no end: you'll have to cut out the
Marxists and the socialists, of course, anyone who writes critically
about capitalism and education, then the militants, the noisy
anti-racists, the pushy feminists, the gays and lesbians, anyone who
refers to "social justice"—a term under steady attack from the
powerful just now. I'm reminded of the last presidential election when
several presumably well-meaning liberals asked, in effect, if women
would please stop talking so loudly about (or getting) abortions, if
gays would please get back in the closet, and if Black people and
Mexicans might stay out of sight for a few months so that "we" can win
this thing, and then everything will somehow be alright. It's not
only unprincipled, deeply cynical and cowardly, it's suicidal, a
slippery slope with lots of miserable historical precedent.
So, while I think I understand what you've said, no, I don't
appreciate it. I don't rationalize it. I don't endorse it. And I
refuse to participate in portraying myself as a pariah. So invite me.

Sincerely,

Bill

To the Discourse Staff

2006-09-01T18:14:00.000-05:00

1. Teachers have to begin by reclaiming the intellectual and ethical
dimensions of their work, resisting all the attempts to deskill and
hammer them into interchangeable cogs in a bureaucracy, all the
pressure to reduce teaching to a simple set of manageable skills.
Teachers have to decide who they intend to be in the classroom—whether
to stand at attention as dutiful clerks, inculcating students into the
status quo, the social order as it is, obediently passing along the
received curriculum that's handed them, or whether to move beyond
sorting and shaping, striking out in pursuit of the new, questioning
and challenging all that is before them, anything that wounds their
souls. Teachers have to ask themselves whether they're up for being
bold and taking risks. If they're not, perhaps they should withdraw
now, for they've cut themselves off from teaching's intellectual and
ethical well-springs, the real adventure of it all before it's even
begun.
As a teacher considers who to be and where to stand in regard to
children, to community, to parents, to school change, it's worth
considering motivation. Is her choice based on some deep desire to be
on the winning or the popular side, some cunning calculus of power?
Or can she think, finally, of no way she'd rather live than in
opposition to what she considers inhumane, whether it brings
recognition and reward or not? Accommodation is, of course, always
the easier path, but as Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "it won't lead
to the promised land."
If teachers choose a life of risk-taking—and some always will—new
troubles begin, and a host of other questions arises: How do you
introduce important issues without being just another authoritarian
presence in your students' lives? How do you avoid trampling on their
insights, points-of-view, and experiences? How do you survive in your
native land?
Education at its best is eye-popping and mind-blowing—it's about
opening doors, opening minds, inviting students to become more capable
and powerful actors and choice-makers as they forge their own pathways
into a wider world. Education at its best is the practice of freedom.
But much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls
off meaningful choice-making. While many of us long for teaching as
something transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often
locked in situations that reduce teaching to a kind of glorified
clerking, passing along a curriculum of received wisdom and
predigested bits of information. A fundamental choice and challenge
for teachers, then, as I noted, is this: to acquiesce to the machinery
of control, or to take a stand with our students in a search for
meaning and a journey of transformation. To be a prison guard or an
educator. To teach obedience and conformity, or to teach its polar
opposite: initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world,
to identify the obstacles, and the courage to act upon whatever the
known demands.
Lots of schools built for the industrial age look like little
factories, and the metaphor of production dominates the
discourse—assembly lines, management and supervision, quality control,
productivity, and outputs. Students are intermittently the raw
materials moving dumbly down the assembly line while value is added by
the workers/teachers, or, if the metaphor shifts its angle slightly,
students are the workers themselves, workers-in-training, of course.
When a school functions as a prison, and an increasing number of
schools do, students become its little political prisoners—the most
wide-awake of them know it. Compelled by the state to attend, handed
a schedule, a uniform, and a rule-book, sent to a specific designated
space of cell blocks, monitored constantly and controlled
relentlessly—Pledge of Allegiance: 9:00; No talking; Bathroom break:
10:15-10:20; No eating in the classroom; Lunch: 11:45-12:05; Boys and
girls form separate lines; Dismissal bell: 3:10; No running in the
hallways. On and on and on, the whole catalogue of coercion under
forced confinement—every young body the object of domination and
control.
The little prison administrators expect neither uniform compliance nor
automatic submission from every inmate, hence the elaborate mechanisms
for uprooting deviance, for hammering each one into a model
prisoner—obedient, compliant, conforming. It begins with the
near-universal assumption that schools are in the business of sorting
and labeling—winners and losers, smart and stupid, good and bad. Of
course school people are careful not to be so crude—the kinder and
gentler employ euphemisms with a medical ring (ADD; BD; TAG) or the
sounds of science ("problem with impulse control"). The fog machine
is operating at full force, but let just a little air into the room
and it comes to this: the good and the smart will walk the runway to
the winner's circle, the bad and the stupid will be cast down and
out—losers forever. This is a foundational lesson that practically
every school teaches to every/body every day: there is simply no room
to recognize the unique qualities of each child nor to support the
growth, development, and progress of each.
Another basic lesson is this: school learning is a commodity, traded
at the market like boots and hammers. Unlike boots and hammers, whose
value is inherently satisfying and grasped directly and intuitively,
the value and use of school learning is elusive and indirect—hence,
students are asked to accept its unspecified value on faith and to be
motivated and rewarded externally. The value of school learning,
we're assured, has been calculated precisely by wise and accomplished
people, and the masters know better than anyone what's best. The
pay-off is way down the line, but it's surely there, somewhere, over
the rainbow. "Take this medicine," students are told over and over
again, day after tedious day, "it's good for you." Refuse the bitter
pill, and go stand in the corner—where all the other losers are
assembled. Of course, if you were to point out that lots of drop-outs
did OK for themselves—Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson and Ben
Franklin for starters, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, and
Margaret Mead as well, and John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie for
good measure—you'd be called an impudent trouble-maker, and put in the
corner for sure.
Of course, if people are consistently objectified and victimized, if
they are beaten into submission, trained to suppress their own needs
and desires, rewarded for toadyism, and if they come to feel
themselves to be entirely powerless, then there's little hope for a
life lived freely and fully. If people experience their lives as
wholly determined by powerful outside forces and they develop a sense,
then, that they have no agency or possibility whatsoever, if they are
stuck in passivity, sunk in despair and cynicism—Whatcha gonna do? Do
I make the rules? What can I do about any of it?—if all of this
accumulates and settles, then what could it possibly mean to be "born
free" or "living in a democracy, the best country in the world" or
"getting an education to better myself" or "endowed with certain
inalienable rights"? The meanings are anemic at best—hollow, debased,
spectral. If people are unable to act upon or within their presumed
freedom, then actual freedom is reduced to a shabby and shadowy thing,
and the word itself promotes nothing more than an illusion.
Vulnerability is lousy preparation for citizenship.
We are relentlessly reminded that we are free to choose among
products and brands—even as authentic, consequential choices are
withheld—that consuming is a higher form of citizenship than actual
participation in civic life, and that what's good for Microsoft or the
Pentagon is somehow the common good, a benefit for all. Celebrity
overshadows accomplishment, consuming trumps contributing,
accumulation conflates to happiness. This all develops into a
flattening out of any urgent sense of democracy, of any vital vision
of freedom.
Schools for obedience and conformity are characterized by
authoritarianism and irrelevance, passivity and fatalism. They turn
on what Foucault called the little technologies for control and
normalization in classrooms—the elaborate schemes for managing the
crowd, the knotted system of rules and discipline, the exhaustive
machinery of schedules and clocks, the laborious programs of testing
and grading, assessment, judgment, and evaluation, all of it adding up
to a familiar cave, an intricately constructed hierarchy—everyone in a
designated place and a place for every one. Knowing and accepting
one's pigeonhole on the vast and barren mountainside becomes all the
lesson one needs.
Central to an education for citizenship, participation, engagement,
and democracy—an education toward freedom—is developing in students
and teachers alike the ability to think for themselves—to decide that
this is black and that this is white, that this is false and the other
true. The core lessons of a liberating education are these: we each
have a mind of our own; we are all works-in-progress swimming toward
an uncertain and indeterminate shore; we can each join with others in
order to act on our own judgments and in our own freedom; human
progress and freedom is always the result of thoughtful dissent and
action.
School has always been and will always be contested space—What should
be taught? In what way? Toward what end? By and for whom?—and at
bottom the struggle is over the essential questions: What does it
meant to be human? What does it mean to construct a meaningful,
purposeful, and valuable life in this world, here and now? What
demands does freedom make?
On the side of a liberating and humanizing education is a pedagogy
that has as its beginning and end identical points on a circle: the
act of questioning. This pedagogy of questioning opens rather than
closes spaces of curiosity, perspective, dialogue, and imagination.
It's modus operandi is generous not stingy, revealing not concealing,
unmasking, exposing, embracing. It's a tool that promotes
intellectual growth, awakens curiosity, encourages skill development,
and a lot else. And at its core this pedagogy of questioning demands
something altogether different, something upending and revolutionary
from students: repudiate your subordinate place in the pecking order,
it urges, remove that distorted, congenial mask of compliance. You
must change. All of this requires a radical rethinking of the
relationship of teacher and student, students and learning, schools
and society, education and justice.
And it implies a common faith: every human being is of infinite and
incalculable value—each an intellectual, emotional, physical, social,
spiritual, and creative life-force. We take as standard and guide, as
mission, nourishing and challenging free people to act freely in a
free society—in history—to right wrongs, to repair damage, to correct
errors, to oppose all unnecessary suffering.
One last note: Don't get discouraged by thinking that the so-called
Sixties was a time of easy activism in comparison to today. Those
years have been mythologized beyond recognition, and one negative
aspect of that myth-making is the received wisdom that today's
activists are somehow inadequate, today's students uniquely stupefied,
today's aspirations hopelessly constrained. I disagree. The
responsibility of people who hope to make humane and progressive
social change are the same: analyze the situation before you, learn
all you can, reach out and speak up, organize and take action. And
approach the whole thing with some humility—you don't know all there
is to know—and a lot of hope—if I can understand this or that, then
others can too.
2. NCLB is simply the latest fraud—more comprehensive, perhaps, more
dressed up in the cloak of science, more sophisticated in its putative
concern for the poor—pushed onto the public schools, onto students and
teachers and parents, onto society by the powerful. It relies on
stupid and narrowing notions of human intelligence and accomplishment,
standardization and simple-minded metrics that sort youngsters into
hierarchies of winners and losers.
There are several ways to imagine alternatives. One is to look at
what the wealthy and the privileged provide for their children—small
classes staffed by well-educated and committed teachers, campuses that
are safe and functional and aesthetically inviting, abundant
materials, all manner of clubs and teams and activities—and demand
that for all children and youth. The fact is we know how to create
wonderful schools for kids in every imaginable circumstance. What we
lack is neither knowledge nor resources; what we lack is political
will.
3. The Weather Underground was called a terrorist organization by
the government and the prostate, bought media at the time, and it's
still referred to that way. Of course, it was no such thing.
We should demand a definition each time the word "terrorist" is used,
and we should insist on stable, universal usage applicable to crazed
groups of religious fanatics, cults, political formations, but also to
governments. If "terrorist" means attacks on innocents or
non-combatants, for example, if it means random killing or injury, if
it means coercion and intentional collective punishment… then, no, the
Weather Underground was not terrorist. But the US government was
terrorist in Viet Nam, and is terrorist in Iraq, and Israel offered a
textbook case of terrorism unleashed last month in Lebanon.
4. The point of progressive political action is always to educate,
organize, and mobilize masses of people. You can judge your own
effectiveness by a simple standard: did our activity teach us as well
as others, did it strengthen the movement for change, did it engage
and involve more people who are collectively working toward
revolution?
I don't advocate "violent protest." We do, however, live in a sewer
of violence in this country, the greatest purveyor of violence in
history. The fact that the violence is largely exported or hidden or
kept from your consciousness through a mighty range of mystifications
and manipulations doesn't make it less true. Part of our job is
taking the pretty mask off the beast, showing what's really there.
And we need to remember that power concedes nothing without a demand,
and that violent thugs rarely give up power willingly.
But back to the point of protest—we need to build a movement for
change, a mighty radical mass movement. We don't need to try to
calculate whether this or that act will get this or that opportunist
to vote our way in Congress. Remember, FDR was not a labor leader,
nor was LBJ a Civil Rights leader—each was a brilliant politician
responding to facts on the ground. Create a different reality—alter
the facts on the ground—and watch what happens.
5. You have to live as if the world could be otherwise: you have to
become the change you hope to see in the world.
For every human being life is, in part, an experience of suffering and
loss and pain. But our living experience also embraces other
inescapable facts: that we are all in this together, and that much
(but not all) of what we suffer in life is the evil we visit upon one
another, that is, unjustified suffering, unnatural loss, unnecessary
pain—the kinds of things that ought to be avoidable, that we might
even imagine eliminating altogether.
In the realm of human agency and choice, we come face to face with
some stubborn questions: Can we stop the suffering? Can we alleviate
at least some pain? Can we repair any of the loss? We lurch, then,
toward deeper considerations: Can society be changed at all? Is it
remotely possible—not inevitable, certainly, perhaps not even very
likely—for people to come together freely, to imagine a more just and
peaceful social order, to join hands and organize, to struggle for
something better, and to prevail?
If society cannot be changed under any circumstances, if there is
nothing to be done, not even small and humble gestures toward
something better, well, that about ends all conversation. Our sense
of agency shrinks, our choices diminish. What more is there to say?
But if a fairer, more sane, and just social order is both desirable
and possible, that is, if some of us can join one another to imagine
and build a participatory movement for justice, a public space for the
enactment of democratic dreams, our fields open slightly. There would
still be much to be done, for nothing would be entirely settled. We
would still need, for example, to find ways to stir ourselves and our
neighbors from passivity, cynicism, and despair; to reach beyond the
superficial barriers that wall us off from one another; to resist the
flattening effects of consumerism and the blinding, mystifying power
of the familiar social evils—racism, sexism, and homophobia, for
example; to shake off the anesthetizing impact of the authoritative,
official voices that dominate the airwaves, the media, and so much of
what we think of as common sense; to "release our imaginations" and
act on behalf of what the known demands, linking our conduct firmly to
our consciousness. We would be moving, then, without guarantees, but
with purpose and with hope.
Education is, of course, one arena of struggle as well as
hope—struggle because it stirs in us the need to reconsider everything
we have wrought, to look at the world anew, to question what we have
created, to wonder what is worthwhile for human beings to know and
experience, to justify or criticize or bombard or maintain or build up
or overthrow everything before us—and hope because we gesture toward
the future, toward the impending, toward the coming of the new.
Education is where we gather to question whether and how we might
engage and enlarge and change our lives, and it is, then, where we
confront our dreams and fight out notions of the good life, where we
try to comprehend, apprehend, or possibly even change the world.

Letter to the Future

2006-09-01T18:13:00.000-05:00

September 1, 2006

Because I write books, and because I've been a teacher since 1965 and
a professor since 1987, and because I raised three lovely boys who are
now young men and themselves brilliant teachers and writers, and
because I just spent part of the summer with my grand-daughter, and
because I've been a peace and social justice activist, a rebel, a
revolutionary, and a dissident for over forty years, I feel like I've
been writing letters to the future my whole adult life. You can see
some of this more fully—including some letters to young activists—on
billayers.org. Here I'll be brief.
You're young. And the urgent demand on the young is to live. To
live fully and freely, unbound by stupidity, hypocrisy, all the forces
of death. To invent and reinvent yourselves. To decide what you will
make out of what you've been made. To choose who you will become in
the whirlwind into which you've been thrust. You can't choose
everything, it's true—you didn't choose your parents, for example,
your upbringing, your various privileges and oppressions, nor did you
choose to be born into the age of nuclear threat and globalization—but
you must choose who to be in light of all that. It's up to you.
Think of yourself as an unruly spark of meaning-making energy on a
voyage of discovery and surprise—always contingent, incomplete,
unfinished. Always something more to do and to be.
Remember that you're living in history—always dynamic, uncertain,
in-process—and that what you do or don't do actually makes a
difference, even though powerful voices keep saying that nothing you
do will have any impact. Open your eyes to the world around you, see
what's there, dig deeper, ask questions. There's always more to know,
more to do. Can you draw a free-hand sketch of the Middle-East? No?
Why not? Can you explain the history of the Kurds? Can you name
every government overthrown by the US from 1890-2006? Don't you think
that might explain something? You have work to do.
Americans are known the world over for having neither geographic
sense nor much historic knowledge. Who are we in the world? Where
are we in the world? Figure it out.
Remember, too, that the world is neither one-dimensional nor static.
To understand the world and your place in it, you must act upon it.
Just as you can only know ice cream by tasting it, jazz by hearing it,
bike-riding by doing it, you need to learn about the world through
your actions. When you act on the world, it acts back on you. Think
about it. Your schooling has ill-prepared you for action—it taught
you about nature while you need to learn from nature, it taught about
history while you need to learn from history.
Remember finally to engage all people, to embrace the least of us, to
go with the children and the hungry and the powerless and the people
in prison and the homeless. Don't bow down to either power or riches.
Love your families and friends and the miracle of each day, but be
willing to lend your energy when justice demands it. Love your one
precious life enough to find the joy and ecstasy in each moment, and
love the world enough to lend your weight when needed. Act up against
unnecessary suffering and pain, and anything that offends your soul.
Immerse yourself! Be a mensch! Don't let your life make a mockery
of your values! Dive into the wreckage!

Best,

Bill

Teaching Teachers

2006-09-01T18:11:00.000-05:00

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to
become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he [sic,
throughout] is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is
to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to
make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is
white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not.
To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those
questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.

—James Baldwin

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world
enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it
from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the
new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where
we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from
our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from
their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something
unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of
renewing a common world.

—Hannah Arendt

The end of all education should surely be service to others. We
cannot seek achievement for ourselves and forget about the progress
and prosperity of our community. Our ambitions must be broad enough
to include the aspirations and needs of others for their sake and for
our own.

—Cesar Chavez

The drama of education is always a narrative of transformation. Act I
is life as we find it—the given, the known or the received, the
settled and the status quo. Act II is the fireworks, the moment of
upheaval and dissonance, the experience of discovery and surprise, the
energy of remodeling and refashioning. Act III is the achievement of
an altered angle of regard, new ways of knowing and behaving, a new
way of seeing and being. Act III, of course, will necessarily be
recast in some future educational encounter as a new Act I.
This is the fundamental message of the educator: You can change your
life. Wherever you've been, whatever you've done, the teacher invites
you to build on all that you are, and to begin again. There is always
something more to do, more to learn and know, more to experience and
accomplish. You must change your life, and if you will, you can change
your world.
This sense of opportunity and renewal—for individuals, for whole
communities and societies—is at the heart of all education, of
teaching and educational research; it constitutes the ineffable magic
drawing us back to the classroom and the into the school again and
again. Education, no matter where or when it takes place, enables
people to become more powerfully and self-consciously alive; it
embraces as principle and overarching purpose the aspiration of people
to become more fully human; it impels us toward further knowledge,
enlightenment, and human community, toward liberation. Education, at
its best, is an enterprise that helps human beings reach the full
measure of their humanity.
At the center of the educational adventure are communities, students
and teachers in their endless variety: energetic and turbulent,
restlessly struggling, sometimes eager, other times reluctant,
stretching, reaching; coming together in classrooms and community
centers, workplaces, houses of worship, parks, museums, and homes.
They gather in the hope of becoming better, smarter, stronger, and
more capable of rethinking and reconstructing their worlds; they come
together to claim themselves as subjects—lively, awake, and on the
move—in the face of all manner of blockades and obstacles. This
priceless ideal is an expression of every person's true vocation—the
task of humanization.
Simple enough to say, and yet, in countless ways, excruciatingly
difficult to achieve. For identifying humanization as a goal
immediately suggests its opposite: dehumanization as both possibility
and practice. Although education can ignite initiative and courage,
it can as easily become the practice of obedience and conformity. If
education stands in one instance for freedom and breaking through
arbitrary and imposed barriers, we can point to other cases where it
parades as a specific kind of repressive training. We are drawn,
then, into the contested space of teaching and research, of education
itself.
Education doesn't exist outside of history or culture, of course. It
is, rather, at the heart of each in a reciprocal and continuous
circle—education shapes societies; societies shape education. Our
schools belong to us, they tell us who we are and who we want to be.
Authoritarian societies are served by authoritarian schools, just as
free and democratic schools support free and democratic societies.
Because education is always enacted within a social surround—a
community or a society—it always involves ushering the young into some
social order or other, into an entire universe. So educators and
students must keep their eyes open: Why are we here? What matters?
What is the existing social order? Do we warrant or justify the world
as it is? What alternatives are possible? Who do we want to be?
What do we want to discover or understand more fully? What can we
hope for?
A functioning, vital democracy requires, in the first place,
participation, some acceptance of difference, some independent
thought, some spirit of mutuality—a sense of responsibility, an
awareness of mutuality and interdependence, a willingness to learn and
grow and change through dialogue and debate. Democracy demands
active, thinking human beings—we ordinary people, after all, are
expected to make the big decisions that affect our lives—and in a
democracy education is designed to empower and to enable that goal.
Education in a democracy requires imagination, initiative, engagement,
and courage. The promise of public education in our democracy—from
the common school movement of 150 years ago until today—is the deep
potential for equity. With great advantage comes great
responsibility; those with the greatest needs require the greatest
resources and interventions.
Teachers, professors, and researchers need to consider what they are
working for, and what they are working against—against oppression and
subjugation, for example, and against exploitation, hatred,
unfairness, and unkindness. We toil toward enlightenment and
awareness, wide awakeness, protection of the vulnerable, cooperation,
generosity, compassion, love, and peace.
Here we focus on teaching, research, and service as intellectual and
ethical work, something beyond the instrumental and the linear. We
understand that education requires thoughtful, caring people to carry
it forward successfully, and we commit to becoming more caring and
more thoughtful as we grow into our work. This focus requires a
leaning outward, a willingness to look at the world of children—the
sufferings, the accomplishments, the perspectives and the concerns—and
an awareness, sometimes joyous, but just as often painful, of all that
we find. And it requires, as well, a leaning inward, traveling toward
self-knowledge, a sense of being alive and conscious in an always
dynamic world. In each direction, each gesture, we acknowledge that
every person is entangled and propelled and sometimes made mute by a
social surround, and that each has, as well, a wild and vast inner
life—a spirit, a soul, a mind.
We begin with a faith that every child and every student and every
informant comes as a whole and multidimensional being—a gooey
biological wonder, pulsing with the breath and beat of life itself,
intellectual and spiritual, evolved and evolving, shaped by genetics,
twisted and gnarled by the unique experiences of living. Every human
being has as well a complex set of circumstances that makes his or her
life understandable and sensible, bearable or unbearable. Each is
unique, each walks a singular path across the earth, each has a mother
and a father, each with a distinct mark to be made, and each somehow
sacred. This recognition asks us to reject any action that treats
anyone as an object, any gesture that thingifies other human beings.
It demands that we embrace the humanity of every person.
We practice multicultural education as a response to reality: we are a
multicultural, multilingual society, after all. What would schooling
be if we rejected multiculturalism? Education for white supremacy?
What does opposition to learning many languages lead to? Promotion of
a barricaded ignorance? Teachers must learn to embrace the students
who actually come through the door—from a range of languages,
cultures, backgrounds, abilities—and challenge them to stretch, to
reach, to go further.
We oppose the manipulative reduction of lives into neatly labeled
packages. We resist both the easy embrace of oversimplified
identities—a reliance on a single aspect of a life to say it all—and
the corrosive gesture of fragmenting lives into conceptually crude
categories. Our stance is identification with, not identification of.
Our approach is one of solidarity, something beyond service.
We see knowledge as a form of power that can transform individual
lives as well as whole communities and societies. But to do so,
knowledge must be freely sought, explicitly linked to moral purposes,
and tied to conduct. It must stand for something. In the College of
Education we stand for humanization—for increasing human capacity,
human creativity, human intelligence and enlightenment, human freedom.

Rick Ayers Retires

2006-09-01T18:05:00.000-05:00

Rick Ayers – June 17, 2006
The kind of wisdom and intimacy we see here today is no surprise, but
it is to be noted and cherished. Music, spoken word, children, food,
a little chaos… These things are neither spontaneous nor automatic.
They are hard-won and invaluable.
Because I've known Rick for almost 60 years—much longer than anyone
else in the room… And we're told we look exactly alike… And because we
lived together—off and on—for over a third of that time… And because
we learned a lot about being students and teachers together, wrote
books together, looked out for one another's kids, buried our mother,
and take care of our father together…
And because we fought the power together, came of age in opposition to
the whole nasty mess of racism and war and empire, tried to make a
revolution together, and went on the run together, and plan to be on
the barricades together during the next inevitable upheaval, perhaps
in our walkers or wheelchairs by then…
And because he was the first real intellectual I ever knew, and he
taught me early on the power of ideas, the beauty and importance of
books—which I know he taught many of you—and has been a life-long
model for me—and for many of you—of someone who has both a free mind
and a happy heart, the courage to be exactly who he wants to be… in
the face of all manner of pressures and obstacles.
For all these reasons and more I want to say a word about my brother
Rick on the occasion of his leaving Berkeley High School.
Rick was born into privilege—"Born into Belonging"—in a country
stratified by race and class and standing like a colossus astride the
whole world. He could have had it easy. But he never bought into the
idea that background is destiny, that privilege is somehow deserved,
nor that there is some chosen people who ought to live above and
beyond the rest, and so he chose to exile himself from all that and to
reinvent himself against the facts of his birth—he chose, and this
would astonish our waspish parents, to be re-born a mensch.
Mensch as some of you know, is Yiddish and without an exact English
translation, but Rosa Luvemborg, the great German revolutionary came
close, writing from prison to a friend. Being a mensch, she said, is
a contradictory ideal—it asks that you simultaneously love your own
life enough to find the joy and the beauty and the ecstasy in every
precious moment—the clouds, the sunrise, your friends—and at the same
time that you put your shoulder on history's great wheel when needed,
that you fight with fierce determination against injustice; all the
unnecessary suffering and pain we see everywhere around us. In this,
Rick has always been a mensch: a lover of life who steadfastly refuses
to close his eyes to injustice, someone who rages against injustice
without himself becoming pinched or bitter. Rick is an uber-mensch.
Many of us—appalled by the staggering distance between reality and our
hopes for peace and democracy and justice, horrified by the state of
the world and the criminal misbehavior of our rulers—become
speechless. We're told, even by allies, to trim our sails, to
compromise our principles again and again, to just grow up.
Rick never does.
He speaks, he writes, he acts and his message, harsh and unyielding in
one way is also filled with hope that human beings can be better, that
we can, if we will, find ways to come together and change the things
that matter most.
He brings this contradictory ideal to his teaching, to his
identification with students and their families, to his deep empathic
understanding of others: he challenges and nurtures in the same
gesture; he becomes the other person without ever ceasing to be
himself; he changes while remaining constant.
The great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, wrote a piece to Paul
Robeson, another freedom fighter, and her words seem appropriate here:
Paul Robeson
That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music words
devout and large,
that we are each other's
harvest:
we are each other's
business:
we are each other's
magnitude and bond.

This is Rick, this is the legacy of his work here, this is his
message: Love one another. Work hard and take responsibility for the
whole.
In your family and with your friends and neighbors, in your community
and your nation, in your politics and in your life: be a
revolutionary; be a socialist; at least be a mensch.

Eugenics and Education

2006-09-01T18:03:00.000-05:00

As finite beings in an infinite and expanding universe, our
understanding of the world is necessarily contingent, partial, and
incomplete, and yet we live for the most part as if our everyday
assumptions, biases, myths, and common sense are simply and entirely
true. To say that we are—each and all of us—blind to our own
blind-spots is a tautology. To take that tautology as a provocation,
as a point of departure toward upending our own orthodoxy requires
curiosity and courage. Ann Winfield has an abundance of both—a lively
and exquisite mind combined with a willingness to relentlessly poke
around in the dark. The result is a work of power and
importance—breath-taking in its reach and surprising on almost every
page. Here she interrogates—through the lens of a movement and an
ideology that dominated our culture for much of the twentieth
century—the story of democracy, freedom, and exalted forward progress
that we Americans love to tell ourselves. Written out of the official
story as quackery and the handiwork of a few nut-cases, Winfield
demonstrates beyond doubt that eugenics was not only respectable,
mainstream science but also that its major tenets were well-springs in
the formation of American public schools with echoes in the every day
practices of today. Formed in the crucible of white supremacy and
rigid hierarchies of human value, American schools have never
adequately faced that living heritage.
We no longer talk of "miscegenation" or "imbeciles," of course, and
we are likely to look upon forced sterilization and race-based
marriage laws as archaic. But Winfield undermines any sense of smug
superiority we might grant ourselves by drawing a direct line from
those repulsive labels and practices to our own obsessions with
"standards" and "accountability," test scores and grades. White
supremacy surely changes its spots but it remains durable and
dominant.
Eugenics and Education will change the way you think about,
curriculum and teaching, school reform, educational policy and
practice, and even the current debates concerning immigration and
marriage. This is essential reading for anyone who hopes to
understand the sorry state of our schools today, and the deep changes
we must undertake to improve them. After seeing the world through Ann
Winfield's eyes, when you hear the terms "gifted and talented" or "at
risk" you're likely to wince. Good.

Grades

2006-09-01T18:00:00.000-05:00

I hate grades -- hate giving them, can't stand getting them (unless,
of course, I get an A+, and then I think I'm cool for a minute, until
I start to feel cheap and silly).

Giving grades drives most thoughtful teachers up a tree. It's one of
the worst moments in teaching -- an insistent reminder that we are all
cogs in a larger certification machine, that thought and care and mind
and heart are not the main things about school, that hierarchy and
one's place in it is more important than engaged thinking, and that
schooling is largely disconnected from learning and only loosely
linked to education.

Grades are distorting in many ways. They drive curriculum and narrow
everyone's perspective. They mean more to some students than to
others, they tend to reward obedience and conformity, they are more
important to students than to teachers, they undermine trust and
cooperation, they twist relationships and encourage toadyism, and they
discourage inquiry, risk-taking, creativity, and much more. They are
about monitoring, controlling, and punishing. They close down
thinking where education is supposed to open it up.

How will you grade when you are teaching? Don't say, "I'll have to
see what system they use." They'll likely use a system like the one
used with you, like the ones just characterized. And remember, we all
succeeded in those systems. So if they seemed sensible and "fair" to
us, we couldn't help but be looking through the lenses of the winners.
Did they help us learn? Learn what? How? What about others?
Should all kids learn? How? Why?

I begin with an assumption that each student brings intelligence,
commitment, concern, experience, engagement, passion, and skill to
class. School (and yes, even this classroom) may fail to access that
intelligence, passion, skill, and so on, but I take that to be my (and
the school or "education" system's) problem. It's too easy to blame
those who don't conform and submit to whatever it is the teacher
wants, to label them as backward or stupid or behavior disordered.

In this class my goal is to create a safe place for us to critically
examine teaching and learning, urban education, school environments,
and the process of becoming teachers. I want us to inquire into the
various contexts in which we teach. That's my main goal. I'd like
you to have in mind your own developing "learning agenda" for this
class -- a statement of your own goals. We'll then have to negotiate
how to meet your goals and my goal together. That won't be
impossible.

"Objective grading," however, is impossible, no matter how many
little charts or percentage tables a teacher produces. "Fair grading"
is an oxymoron. So I will give you grades based on my judgment and
our dialogue about how you do at meeting your own goals and my goal.
My goal will more likely be met if you: WORK HARD IN CLASS;
PARTICIPATE CONSISTENTLY IN ONE OF THE MANY VENUES PROVIDED; HAVE AN
OPEN MIND; PUT FORWARD YOUR IDEAS; BRING YOUR EXPERIENCE; RESPECT
OTHERS; and FIND A BALANCE BETWEEN BEING A TEACHER AND A LEARNER HERE.
I will partly grade you on effort, and openness, growth, consistency,
and clarity. My bias is to grade high, admitting my own flawed and
fallible judgment.

A Single Spark

2006-07-22T11:19:00.000-05:00

A single spark can start a prairie fire—an ancient saying that appears in many forms and in different cultures, carrying a range of shifting implications and meanings. In the version I first heard—from China—it pointed to the power of one action to inspire other actions, which themselves catalyze a cascading chain of actions and reactions. One flint and a single stone struck together in the right direction under optimal conditions can begin a conflagration spreading throughout the countryside. Prairie fires, in this telling, are not always catastrophic; they can be, as well, naturally occurring events, necessary and renewing, removing the thick mat of thatch that suffocates life, releasing the seeds while encouraging the birds and the insects and the other animals, all the flora and fauna, opening and crawling, transforming and lurching to life.
This old saying fits so perfectly, maps so naturally onto teaching because teachers strike sparks within every student every day. There is simply no way to predict with any certainty which will come to nothing, and which spark might just start that prairie fire. We are striving into the unknown, a place where teachers might feel the awesome power they wield, might experience, as well, the unknowable potential of each student, each three-dimensional human creature before them. Teachers might pay closer attention to every aching detail and each overarching circumstance, to sense at every moment that what they do—or, just as important, what they fail to do—has a significance beyond itself, that some act or another may in fact make a mighty and magnificent difference, entirely unforeseen by them, in this life or in that one. Teachers might not change the world in dramatic fashion, but we certainly change the people who will change the world. This single spark could be that long-anticipated catalyst, that historic meeting of flint and stone that releases the flames of change.
All teaching is enacted in a specific here and now, all of it brought to life in the mud and muck of the world as we find it—this prairie or that field, this street or the other one. We don’t choose the world as such; rather we are thrust into a world already there, going, going, going, up and running. We need to take the world as it is to start, unvarnished, and plunge forward as participants if we are to live fully, deeply, purposefully—if we are to see both the beauty and the pain of it, if we are to add our little weight to the balance.
It is in this sense that teaching is both an intellectual and an ethical enterprise. It requires thoughtful and caring people to carry it forward—not a head without a heart, and not some vaguely smiling flame without a brain. Teachers need to both think and feel their way into what we’re doing. In fact, it's at the crossroads of the intellectual and the ethical where teachers begin to find their bearings. It’s here that we crawl toward love—not love as a “throbbing heart or a soulful imploring” as Pat Carini has written, but love as a call to action, an impulse that insists that all human beings matter, even when law or custom or social practice or restriction says otherwise.
We teachers are increasingly deskilled and hammered into interchangeable cogs in a bureaucracy, pressured to reduce teaching to a set of manageable and easily superviseable tasks, and to sum it up on the basis of a single simple-minded metric, to strip it of any moral purpose or intellectual engagement or creative action whatsoever. In these circumstances, at this moment, it becomes even more important to find ways to resist, to fight back, to rescue teaching from the gathering forces of mindlessness and carelessness.
The prophetic poet Audre Lourde wrote: “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent we are still afraid.” It might be best, then, to take a chance, to speak out and to act up. Since all life is a risk, stepping forward affords at least the possibility of a different perspective, the hope of something better. If what is before us is out of balance, if some part of what we see stands as an obstacle to our humanity or if it is in some sense unacceptable or offensive to the better angels of ourselves, we are called to say “no.” It is in this spirit of resistance and hope that we go in search of a humanistic pedagogy.
Educators face a contradiction at the heart of their efforts: the humanistic ideal and the democratic injunction tell us that every person is an entire universe, that each can develop as a full and autonomous person engaged with others in a common polity and an equality of power; the capitalist imperative insists that profit is at the center of economic, political, and social progress and develops a culture of competition, elitism, and hierarchy. An education for democracy fails as an adjunct to capitalism just as an education for capitalism fails to build either a democratic ethos or a participatory practice—either the schools or the system must die.
Two slim but important books offer thoughtful looks at this age-old conflict. Holding Values by Brenda Engel with Anne Martin is subtitled “What We Mean by Progressive Education,” and the “we” refers to several key, long-time members of the North Dakota Study Group, an irregular band of guerrilla educators Vito Perrone assembled for the first time in 1972. Its general focus has always been the state of education and the current challenges to humanistic and democratic practices, but over three and a half decades the range of specific issues addressed and engaged has been impressive—evaluation and assessment, standards and testing, racism and diversity, children and the curriculum, and always, at bottom, the promise and the demands of democracy. This small but hardy and determined group meets annually, and boasts among its members Rebecca and Hubert Dyasi, Lilian Weber, Jay and Helen Featherstone, Francisco Guajardo, Pat Carini, George Hein, Edward Chittenden, and Deborah Meier, as well as Joan Bradbury from the Frances Parker School.
Bob Davis’ Teaching Tough Kids explores the work of “five provocative educators” of the twentieth century, each an explorer and in their own contexts a revolutionary—the redoubtable Deborah Meier again, a living American, a MacArthur Fellow, a charter North Dakota member, and four Europeans whose experiences span the twentieth century: Russia’s Anton Makarenko, who came of age at the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution; Poland’s Janusz Korczak, who was murdered with his charges at Treblinka in 1942; France’s Celestin Freinet, imprisoned by the Vichy government during World War II; and Great Britain’s Chris Searle who taught in working-class London and Sheffield as well as revolutionary Grenada and Mozambique. Davis describes each teacher in action, locates each in the unique concentric circles of context—historical flow, social condition, cultural surround—that make these lives sensible and important, and finds in each a person wrestling with the knot of this fundamental contradiction: reverence, awe, respect for the humanity of every student; energy, focus, effort to create a society in which that reverence can breathe and perhaps one day thrive. These are teachers offering students the opportunity to change their lives, all the while working to change the world.
Davis might have chosen a hundred others who taught toward transformation—one thinks of Paulo Freire, of course, and Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Carter G. Woodson, Herb Kohl and Septima Clark, Myles Horton, Bob Moses, Mike Rose, Bill Bigelow, Linda Christiansen, George Wood, Bob Peterson, Rita Tenorio, W.E.B. DuBois, or Bob Davis himself. He might have chosen any of the teachers represented in Holding Values. But these five are well-chosen—each taught for many years, each founded a school, each developed innovative curriculum and wrote thoughtfully about teaching, and each faced the challenge of authoring a unique teaching life against a backdrop of, and while participating in, the upheaval to create a new, more peaceful, more just social order.
Vito Perrone and the sixteen educators he convened in November, 1972 in Grand Forks, ND were all “energetic, experienced, and imaginative thinkers about schools and schooling” (p. 5). Some, like Lillian Weber and Deborah Meier, were life-long socialists and activists engaged in struggles for civil rights and peace, and determined to reorganize public schools as sites of democratic practice. Others, like Pat Carini, founded or worked in small, independent alternative schools, counter-institutions they hoped would be examples and catalysts for humanistic changes in education and society more widely. All were people alive to and aware of the contradiction at the heart of teaching: the humanist ideal struggling to breathe in a social and economic surround determined to choke it to death, a system that will not and cannot tolerate its existence. This intolerance, importantly, requires no extra effort or human will, no mobilization or evil intent whatsoever to do its murderous work—the normal functioning of the system crushes community and destroys democracy.
Brenda Engel does a good job of bringing the North Dakota characters to life, and of unearthing the visions and values, the moral principles that animated this far-flung and talented group. The Study Group itself is an example of another healthy contradiction that lives at the heart of excellent classrooms—strong-willed individuals, each with a mind of her or his own, engaged in intense, sometimes contentious dialogue, which moves the collective forward. It has been traditional for Vito Perrone, the group’s godfather, to open and close the meetings, and his presentations have always been “discursive, low-key, informed, often ironic, humorous, and inclusive” (p. 7). Engel quotes from one of Perrone’s opening talks to give us a feel for the tone, style, and content:
The standards-based reform direction is generally discussed as new to American education, getting us caught up with other major industrialized countries in the world. We should all exert caution every time we hear that something relating to schools is new. It usually means that those speaking of the new haven’t chosen to examine the historical record. Our need for historical perspective is always large. Otherwise, we lose sight of the larger context, the roots of our work. We also lose, I believe, the potential for genuine reform. In addition, we should worry when the motivation to do something educationally is to help us catch up with some other country—a stance that seems to look right past the students most of us see day in and day out, almost as if they aren’t there. I envision here a group of six- or seven-year-olds being told that they have to study hard to make sure we stay ahead of the Japanese. Why would any of these children care about competition with Japan? Why should their teachers even have that in mind?

Jay Featherstone writes of the large themes that constitute the transformational-humanist tradition. He sees these themes as sites for investigation rather than settled dogma, and so he invites us into a series of challenges to engage. The first is the challenge of democracy itself: What is democracy? What does schooling in a democracy look like? How might we build democratic communities in our classrooms? Featherstone points to the mismatch of increased standardization and the tightening of bureaucratic control over schools at a time of unprecedented immigration, movement, and dislocation, a time when the need to model living democratically is at its zenith. He cites the greatest poet of democracy, Walt Whitman, who wrote that democracy “is a great word whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted” (p. 43).
Another challenge involves “the ecology of childhood—the task of making schools and other settings good environments and communities in which children develop as whole and healthy people—not test factories where kids get evaluated in one-sided ways” (p. 43). The school, then, should align to the child, and not the other way round. This means there must be a focus on the quality of children’s lives, and on opportunities for imagination, expression, and experimentation in a safe and buoyant space.
A further challenge is for inclusion, “the democratic goal of educating all students for participation in intellectual and academic complexity” (p. 44). This means both breaking down the barriers to full participation of historically oppressed or excluded groups, and offering everyone “an intellectually ambitious education” (p. 45).
And joined with these and at the center of things is the challenge to see the larger society as it really is—riddled with injustice, burdened by racism, disfigured by imperial ambitions, with the schools at least partially maimed as they are pressured to become sites that reinforce “inequalities of class and race and gender” (p. 45). Featherstone sums up the progressive teacher’s ambition as linking “democratic possibilities in education to fresh possibilities in politics and our national life” (p. 45).
If democracy is a special social arrangement, how would we describe its specific character? And if education in a democracy requires something different from the requirements of education, say, in a totalitarian or royal society, then what is that different something?
The short answer is obvious: totalitarianism demands obedience and conformity, hierarchy, command and control. Royalty requires allegiance. Democracy, by contrast, requires free people coming together voluntarily who are capable of both self-realization and, at the same time, full participation in a shared political and economic life. Democracy is a form of associative living in which people embrace a level of uncertainty, incompleteness, and the inevitability of change. There are no immutable, fixed standards, the same for all, that will ultimately serve democratic purposes.
Teachers in democratic schools cannot be mechanical cogs in a bureaucratically-driven machine or place-holders in an impersonal system, but rather must be highly-trained and well-rewarded professionals afforded a large degree of flexibility and autonomy in order to attend to and support the growth of children. In a democracy teachers must be models of thoughtfulness and care, exemplars of problem-solving and decision-making, people capable of asking deep questions, drawing necessary connections, incorporating the surprising and the unexpected and the new as it occurs into classroom life.
Assessment in democratic schools, then, must be transparent and public, collectively decided upon, and rooted in ongoing student work. It is not a separate and isolated event, above and beyond teachers and students; rather, assessment is a broad, relevant and connected part of classroom life, an exercise providing an ongoing look at progress and need.
But look for a moment at most schools as they actually are—all the commonsense assumptions, the broad commonplace features and activities, the reality beyond the rhetoric. What is expected of us—teachers and students, parents and administrators? What have we become accustomed to? The simplest, most eloquent answer comes from the mouths of James Herndon’s young students, locked in a segregated ghetto elementary school. Whenever they were asked why they were kowtowing to some arbitrary or particularly maddening and inane school custom—begging permission and then lining up to use the toilet, for example, or spending hours on mindless, repetitive tasks—their response was, always the same: because that’s “the way it spozed to be.”
The way it spozed to be is characterized by division and isolation—students against teacher, teachers against the administration, the union versus the board. Worse, school divides students against one another—each a little one-man skiff on his or her own bottom—through mechanisms of grades and tests and rankings. It divides and alienates students further within themselves—the arbitrary demarcation of experience and knowledge into disciplines and subjects, the disconnection of interest and relevance, initiative and courage from school-sanctioned success. And those tests and grades and scores: a reductive shorthand that turns kids into stick-figures, lifeless and brittle; they trumpet the triumph and unambiguous wonder of objectivity, when in fact objectification itself is the greatest problem and weakness of the standardizing tests. All this disunity and disengagement, all the segregation and isolation—where does it leave us?
The way it spozed to be bows before numbers, genuflects to the values of quantification. Schools then promote a flattened world where things get counted, or, as one of my education professors told us years ago, everything that exists exists in some amount, and so everything that exists must be measurable. We asked him about love, hope, beauty, joy, imagination, and possibility, and he said we were being foolish. Teach only what you can test, he said, and test only what you’ve taught. The “measure of man” is the impossible ideal of a scholar like that, and the mismeasure of humanity the inevitable outcome.
The way it spozed to be requires testing, sorting, labeling, ranking. I remember the eccentric and always amusing A.S. Neil, founder of Summerhill School in England, when pressed by twelve-year-olds to give them an examination because… well, you know. He sat his charges down and administered a real test. Here’s a sample question:
Where are they following: Madrid, Thursday Island, yesterday, love, democracy, hate, my pocket screwdriver?

I’m always a little skeptical when reformers come forward with schemes to “integrate the curriculum” or to “create real-world projects and internships.” Why was the curriculum segregated in the first place? I ask. When did the unreal world get such a mighty foothold in our classrooms? Why does the student feel walled off from society and the earth anyway?
If we peek for a moment beneath the official high-sounding justification for compulsory schooling—to create good and productive citizens, say, or to allow students to reach their full potential, or to unlock the talent and energy of each little darling—there’s a truth that dares not speak its name: the way it spozed to be is designed to mold and control the herd, to engineer and shape-up the unruly crowd, to grind potentially free people into obedient soldiers, servile and efficient laborers, mindless consumers. Our rulers were not always so wimpy, so reluctant to say it plainly and out loud. In 1909 Woodrow Wilson shouted out, to no one’s amazement, that “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
The way it spozed to be is designed to sort youngsters into these classes, to find for each a proper role in the existing social order. Schools reward conformity and mindless habits of obedience with a vengeance, but not without reason; they punish deviance relentlessly and sometimes ruthlessly, but with a clear purpose. In this sense, and with this aim of education noted explicitly, schools are doing one heck of a job—they are terrifically successful sorting machines.
Brenda Engel notes that her group was originally called the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation. Even though the last two words have been dropped, evaluation in the largest sense remains a central concern. Engel points out that “The issue of educational evaluation has to do basically with power relationships, which are at the heart of politics: Who has the right to evaluate what and whom? Who decides on criteria and instruments? What degree of consent needs to be sought from those having a stake in the consequences?” (p. 13) Questions, questions, questions; challenges to received wisdom; demands to be heard, to be seen, to be valued as an equal—the center of a democratic pedagogy and a democratic society.
Because teaching aims both to guide and to set free, to initiate into as well as to liberate from, teaching is one part prescription and another part permission. Great teachers walk this fault line consciously, with courage and confidence, working to move their students into thinking for themselves, awakening in them new awarenesses, igniting their imaginations and encouraging them to live awhile in possibility, spurring them to go further and further. And with all this teachers simultaneously provide students with access to the tools of the culture, the structures of the disciplines, the various languages and literacies that will allow them to participate fully and freely. This is possible when teachers present themselves as questioning, fallible, searching human beings themselves—identical in this regard to those they teach.
It is always a struggle for conscientious teachers to be true to students while keeping an eye on the world those students will inherit. There are some common themes, however, from the lives and work of the educators assembled by Engel and Davis that will be helpful for further thinking and rethinking, for action, and for rethinking once more:
* Teaching toward transformation involves seeing students as whole human beings with hearts and minds, bodies and spirits that must somehow be taken into account. We must find our way beyond the half-language of labels.
* We must be doubly serious in our efforts to teach our students the various literacies that will allow them to become competent and powerful in their worlds.
* We must provide opportunities for students to do and to make, to be authors and artists (not outlaws) and to become valuable and valued in their various communities.
* We must learn from rather than about the world—from work, not about work; from democracy, not about democracy; from nature, not about nature; from history, geography literature, maths, and so on.
* We must bring the community into the school and the school into the community. Classrooms are contested spaces, and the sooner we face that fact, the more effective we might become.
An education for democracy begins with the belief that each person has the right and responsibility to participate publicly, that each can and should make a difference. The principles of associative living—community, equality, liberty—must, then, be brought to the fore in both classroom and community.

KAPPAN Backtalk: A Response to Christine and Laughlin

2006-07-22T11:13:00.000-05:00

In spite of Gary Laughlin’s thoughtless repetition of the clichés and received wisdom regarding the pathology of the “inner city” family, the central point of his note is important and, I believe, correct: all human beings, and most markedly adolescents, need a nurturing environment and a place to belong in order to thrive. There’s overwhelming evidence that adolescents do much better on several important measures when they are allowed to participate in smaller, more intimate learning communities. It’s not rocket science, to use another cliché.
An important part of the evidence is simply to notice what the most privileged people in our society provide for their kids—schools with a focus and a clear mission, small classes, lots of special programs. But there’s other evidence: countless studies not only affirm the value of smaller learning communities, but show further that kids who are poor or from traditionally oppressed groups benefit most in these settings.
None of this—and let’s add here Charles Christine’s call for “relevance” in high school programs and a culture that he calls “camaraderie”—leads logically to the conclusion that we ought to support JROTC per se in urban schools. We could, as well, support breaking big schools into smaller, themed academies, or we could advocate for a generously funded program of clubs and teams in which all would participate, or we could develop an intense and engaging community apprenticeship/internship/mentoring program. Or a lot else. Why JROTC, and why only JROTC?
Mr. Laughlin finds it “reprehensible” that I would allow my “personal views to dictate what is correct”—an odd reprimand since my “personal views” are the only ones I have, just as his “personal views” are the only ones he has, and in any case having “personal views” is not the same as sitting on a stiff chair in an arid room under a single bare bulb refusing all experience, art, conversation, input, dialogue, and literature, which I don’t do, and neither does he, I hope—and then turns approvingly to a “Rand study” in support of his views. I’ve seen a lot of studies on JROTC and they have several predictable problems. Bill Bigelow from Rethinking Schools points out that JROTC is an elective in most places, and that if kids don’t attend or do poorly, they’re simply removed from the rolls. Further, comparing JROTC with the general school population is fundamentally flawed because in many places it’s promoted as an accelerated program, in others kids are hand-picked to participate, and in still others it’s the most hopeful pathway to scholarship money and a college education. So, give kids something where they have nothing, offer them some attention in big, anonymous and failing schools, and certainly they’ll do better. A more meaningful comparison would be between the attendance and grades of JROTC kids to, say, kids enrolled in AP classes. The only problem with that hypothetical study is that most of these schools don’t offer AP classes.
And so we’re left to warrant JROTC in its own right. And here I return to my original argument: militarizing the schools is bad for teachers and terrible for kids, it undermines meaningful and robust education, and it distorts our democratic values and the possibility of building a culture of democracy. According to the military the goal of JROTC is “to create favorable attitudes and impressions toward the services and towards careers in the Armed Forces.” This, then, requires that we accept and warrant the role of our military in our lives and the world. And while JROTC sells itself as a promoter of “character” and “discipline,” the means to that imagined end involve fear, intimidation, shame, and unquestioning obedience. Dr. Christine’s “camaraderie” can be a product of the basest, most vile bonding rituals, as history has taught us over and over again.
Dr. Christine’s letter is built on the idea that the US military is a beneficent force in the world—he cites the Strategic Air Command motto “Peace is our Profession” as accurate, and says, without any irony whatsoever, that, “There have always been and will always be nation states that further their interests by dominating their weaker neighbors.” From my perspective—my “personal view” based on boat-loads of evidence—that sentence perfectly describes US foreign policy from its inception until today.
The courageous journalist I.F. Stone had a simple rule-of-thumb that guided all of his efforts as a reporter, and he urged his colleagues to keep this at the center of their consciousness: Remember, he said, that all governments lie. The old Soviet Union, of course, and China, but also Algeria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Dominica, Egypt, France, the Gambia—the entire alphabet of nations lies. And in spite of our hopes and aspirations and mystifications, the US is no exception. In fact the US—near the bottom of the alphabet—is near the top of the list of liars. Perhaps it’s US military power or economic reach, perhaps it’s the sense of self-importance and destiny, but whatever drives it, our government lies to us and to the world from morning until night.
A brief history lesson should at least allow us to proceed as skeptics:
∑ President Polk cast Mexico as the aggressor in 1846, saying it had “Shed American blood upon the American soil”—a lie—and proceeded to seize half of that nation “in self-defense”…
∑ President McKinley said in 1898 that the US had a moral obligation to “liberate” the Cubans from Spain, and later to “civilize” the Filipinos—all lies—as he conquered new territory and murdered hundred of thousands of patriots and resisters and ordinary people…
∑ President Wilson prodded the country into World War I to “make the world safe for democracy”—a lie—as he joined the frenzy to divide the earth and its resources and markets among the old and emerging imperial powers…
∑ President Truman claimed that Hiroshima was a “military target”—a lie—and that dropping nuclear bombs on Japan saved “a million American lives”—an invention of monstrous proportions…
∑ President Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin, and before him Kennedy lied about the extent of US entanglement in Viet Nam, and after each of them Nixon lied about expanding the war into neutral Cambodia…
On and on and on—Reagan lied about Grenada, Bush the First about Panama and Iraq, Clinton about the Sudan… It never ends.
We are today witnessing in public and political life a steady barrage of lying as justification for war, invasion, repression, torture, constant surveillance, and occupation. We are sold a terrifying scenario of risk, as well as a romanticized version of our beneficent mission in the world. Educators must ask ourselves if we are helping our students look critically at these and other received truths steadily raining down upon them from the powerful. Are they able to separate fact from fancy? Can they interrogate whatever nonsense is given to them? Can they identify arguments and sort through conflicting claims and various sources of information in a steady and thoughtful and engaged way? Must they obediently conform to all they’re told? Can they talk back? Can they imagine themselves acting effectively within the world?
We must, with our students, learn to ask the essential questions again and again, and then find ways to live within and beyond the answers we receive. Who are you in the world? How did you (and me) get here? What can we know? What do we have the right to imagine and expect? Where are we going? Who makes the decisions? Who’s left out? Who decides? Who benefits? Who suffers? What are the alternatives? In many ways these kinds of questions are themselves the answers.
The great American historian Howard Zinn argues that we should “Put Away The Flags”:
On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.
Is not nationalism—that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder—one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

Patriotism is perhaps the single concept in greatest need of being subjected to intense scrutiny and questioning in our country today. We live, after all, in a time of empire resurrected and unapologetic, of war without borders and seemingly without end, of greed enthroned and of a rapidly widening gulf between rich and poor, of the elusive and seemingly intractable barriers to racial justice, and of patriotism rehearsed and paraded in every corner, and yet the basic questions of who we are and where we are eludes us. When National Geographic recently surveyed US young adults, huge percentages couldn’t find Iraq, Israel-Palastine, or even Great Britain on a world map. An astonishing 10% couldn’t find the US. I blame the schools, the media, the misinformation culture. Perhaps we really don’t know where we are in the world, and perhaps we harbor a deep sense that it doesn’t matter much. We’re here, after all, and we matter most; everyone else must pay attention to us because we count, but our attention to them—those masses of others who don’t after all, count as much—is pointless.
This enforced ignorance is part of the logic of patriotism, which is of a piece with the logic of nationalism: anyone who by chance was thrust onto this small specific patch of earth is to consider himself or herself superior to all those unfortunates who were thrust onto some other patch. This beatified place is imagined to be qualitatively unparalleled, so different from all other places that it’s as if a high wall shuts it off from the rest of the world. And walls as metaphors are reinforced with barbed wire erected in East Germany, Israel, and now the US on its southern border. Here, within the wall, a chosen people, so to speak, live blessed lives that are nobler, greater, deeper and wiser and more beneficent than the lives led by any other human beings anywhere else.
This is the constant conceit of patriotism, the narcissistic and arrogant stance. The result is that we are willing to fight, kill, and die—or as is almost always the case, to at least send the children of the laboring classes as proxies to do the killing and dying—in a patriotic fever for real estate before reason.
Samuel Johnson called patriotism “the last refuge of a scoundrel,” and Bertrand Russell, “the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons”—patriotism is justification for murder. And the great Malcolm X advised that no one become “so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality…Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” Howard Zinn describes the typically disingenuous justification for war:
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: “The American solider is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.”
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government’s lies.

Could patriotism possibly be a universal value? Is it specific? Should all people in the world at all times be patriotic? How about if some specific country or government is a disaster? Should Germans have been patriotic during the Third Reich? Rwandans during the genocide? Israelis or Americans today? Is America always a force for good?
There is in fact—my “personal view”—no fit between patriotism and humanism. The nation-state has been at bottom always an engine for war and repression. Sometimes—as in our own country—a wobbly and outdated concept of a single national identity lords it over the true variety and diversity and pluralism of human life. We need to notice that a single inflamed identity is always a deprivation, and we need to teach into this contradiction. How is it that the broad human beings in Sarajevo of 1992 were transformed into the ruthless Serbs and fierce Croatians of 1993? Violence, of course, creates identity just as identity creates violence. This is the violence of identity, of nationalism, and of patriotism. The “camaraderie” of murder.
Inflamed identities are morally backward, dangerous and destructive, as well as descriptively wrong. As Anartya Sen writes in Identity and Violence, while “a Hutu laborer from Kigali may be pressured to see himself only as a Hutu and incited to kill Tutsis…he is not only a Hutu, but also a Kigalian, a Rwandan, an African, a laborer and a human being.”
Walt Whitman—his crazy exuberance, his limitless faith in possibility, his joy and love and ecstasy spilling out of him in all directions and only occasionally under control, his generous embrace—instructs us in “Song of Myself,” to see ourselves whole and to reject any one-sided, pumped-up, or flushed identity:
I celebrate, and sing myself…
I am an acme of things accomplished,
I am an encloser of things to be…
Do I contradict myself? Very well then
I contradict myself.
(I am large. I contain multitudes.)

Each of us contains multitudes and so we can choose to emphasize identities we share with others. Circumstances will necessarily constrain our choices, but we must note that identity is not destiny. Still we can choose, and still we must.
While we hear people say all the time, “My country right or wrong,” it’s weird to say, “My sister, drunk or sober.” If my sister is wrong, I have an obligation to criticize her, to correct her. If she persists and does great harm, I’m obliged to stop her. No less my country.
It seems plausible, in fact rather simple, to love your family, your neighbors and friends, the land itself, and to simultaneously oppose the state, the government, the military—it’s essential here and now to draw a bright distinction between the American people and the US state. After all there’s no such thing as a single, unified thing, no one narrative, called America. America as a spiritual concept floating above state power or government apparatus or law or military might is simply a myth. It’s this disembodied spirit we’re instructed to love, and yet the state rambles on, leaving wreckage in its wake.
All cultures and societies, of course, teach about themselves, and all cultures tend to assert their supremacy over others. Societies often construct their identities against some imagined other: the Greeks had their barbarians, the American settlers had the Indians. We study our traditions, our own great works, the language, and it moves us toward reverence. And, as Zinn points out, national spirit might be temporarily benign in a soccer match, say, or in a country “lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion.” But no culture or society exists in isolation, and our nation is so huge and so militarized so that “what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.”
Since the study of one’s own tradition is taken-for-granted, we must—as teachers and students—look outside ourselves at others in search of our fuller humanity. We must teach toward becoming citizens of the world, to stretch and to struggle, to reach toward a fuller humanity. A militarized classroom, a military culture stands as an obstacle. That’s why we should kick the military out of our schools.

The Knowledge Deficit

2006-07-22T11:09:00.000-05:00

The Knowledge Deficit, the latest philippic from E.D. Hirsch, Jr., author of the best-selling Cultural Literacy as well as a dozen little baubles on the theme of “what every child needs to know,” ought to carry a warning label, or, better, a straight-forward subtitle: An Infomercial. It’s a tirade, of course, but here Hirsch, as manic and breathy as any television pitchman, is busy pushing product on every page. There’s scant substance, even as it announces itself a work of “Science,” and so we are left with a sparkly, self-promoting advertisement masquerading as deep thought.
His thesis is easy enough to summarize: there’s a powerful, monolithic ideology emanating from our colleges of education that has controlled American educational thought and practice for a century—he singles out as exemplars the Bank Street College of Education and Teachers College, Columbia University which he calls the “parent organism” spawning romantic principles and doctrinaire professors who scatter throughout the land stifling dissent and drilling prospective teachers in their mistaken “theology” (p. 20) (full disclosure: I attended both); the principles of this dominant dogma must be understood and defeated because they are the chief cause of America’s dismal record of reading achievement; Hirsch’s mission is to break the strangle-hold that generations of romantics and progressives have applied to our schools, and, thereby, to liberate the masses of students for a great leap forward in reading.
The enemy ideology consists of a “terrible trinity” (p. 112) plus one: naturalism, or “the notion that learning can and should be natural” (p. 134); formalism, or “the ideology that what counts in education is not the learning of things but rather learning how to learn” (p. 135); determinism, or “the blame-society theory” (p. 15) that posits inequities—racial and class hierarchies, for example—as significant variables in school success; and, as a bit of an after-thought, localism, the idea that “our states or our towns will decide what shall be taught in our schools” (p. 112). Taken together these pillars of romantic thought are the “deadly enemies” (p. 21) of reading achievement. They must be overturned.
Hirsch makes a case for the power of ideas to move and shape societies. He announces his intention here to analyze the common sense assumptions and relevant ideas driving educational policy, including their historical roots, and then to challenge them with “alternative ideas” (p. 17). His aim is “to help create a public demand for the kind of knowledge-oriented reading program that is needed” (p. 17), for he believes that once such a demand arises, “the rest can safely be left to the cunning of the market” (p. 17). In other words, the territory of ideology will be his battlefield of choice, and here on these pages he intends to mass his army.
At this point one expects the fun to begin, the fireworks to be ignited or the opening volley to be fired. We are, we hope, at least in for some spirited intellectual exchange. But here Hirsch disappoints. Again and again he huffs and he puffs; again and again he pulls back and fails to blow the house down. I found myself rooting for him to let loose just once to see where it might take him (and us), but he never does.
And so we are asked to take this jeremiad on faith. His attack on the “theory of demographic determinism” (p. 15), the idea that poverty plays a substantial role in school failure, is a case in point. He names Richard Rothstein, former education reporter for the New York Times, as the theory’s “most eloquent defender” (p. 15), and yet one can’t find in Rothstein any mention of this “theory,” nor adherence to what Hirsch claims as the theory’s pillars: poverty causes low reading scores, and the schools are powerless to have an impact on that failure. In fact, Rothstein’s view is much more nuanced than that, and in part much closer to Hirsch’s later assertion that schools “can do a far better job” (p. 15).
Hirsch never engages the scholarship, research, or even the polemics on poverty and schooling. There’s no mention, for example, of the work of Jonathon Kozol, Jeannie Oaks, Pedro Noguera, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Lisa Delpit, Deborah Meier, Michael Apple, Angela Valenzuela, Jean Anyon, Asa Hilliard, Michele Fine, or William Watkins, to name a few. His woofing against a straw-man is, for him, apparently enough.
When Hirsch needs a citation to back an assertion of fact he often leaves a blank: “research has shown a body of specific background knowledge to be necessary for reading proficiency…” (p. 41); “According to received views in the American educational community, no specific background knowledge is needed for reading” (p. 39); “It [the Core Knowledge Sequence] is now used in several hundred schools (with positive effects on reading scores), and it is distinguished among content standards not only for its interest and richness, but also because of the carefully-thought-out scientific foundations that underlie the selection of topics” (p. 77).
If a student had written either of the first two sentences, any teacher would respond, “Where’s the citation?” As for the third, Hirsch cites himself, which is a bit troubling. While self-referencing is always a sign of bad writing, it is particularly egregious in a book claiming the mantle of science. But citing himself or his Core Knowledge Foundation to back up his most basic arguments is a major strategy, and it begins on page 3: “Reading proficiency is at the very heart of the democratic educational enterprise, and is rightly called the ‘new civil rights frontier.’” Who could have made that insightful comment, I wonder? Look up footnote number 5… Why it’s E.D. Hirsch himself, from an earlier book.
Go further: On page 12 we learn that “The only thing that transforms reading skill and critical thinking skill into general all-purpose abilities is a person’s possession of general, all-purpose knowledge”; on page 84 that “The chief cause of our school’s inefficiency is precisely this curricular incoherence”; on page 111 that the “lack of commonality across classrooms in the same school and across schools in the same district means that no definable curriculum exists.” Each of these tautologies and assertions may be of interest, may have some merit, and may be worthy of thoughtful inquiry, debate, and analysis. None of that apparently matters much to Hirsch—he cites only himself and then moves on. This is fact-free, faith-based social science at its most fabulous.
Teachers in the thrall of “ed school professors” are a real problem for Hirsch, and absent any clearly defined curricular content that must be delivered no matter what, teachers are “the main sources of indoctrination.” (p. 114) Hirsch gets really worked up here:
Under the covering idea that what counts is how-to knowledge, and in the absence of specific content guidelines, the teacher is left free to teach critical thinking and deep understanding with whatever content seems appropriate. I well remember picking up a German grammar book in Communist East Berlin long before the Berlin wall was erected. Precisely because the book was oriented to the formal elements of German grammar, the content was left to the indoctrinators. If the grammar was to teach declarative sentences, examples were sentences like “The American capitalist imperialist is unfair to the worker.” The formal character of an imperative sentence was shown in “Yankee, go home!” A process orientation offers no inherent protection against indoctrination. Irresponsibility is much less likely to occur when the schools are clear about the basic specific academic content that children should be taught at a particular grade level. (p. 114)

It’s quite a jump for most of us from teachers “left free to teach critical thinking” to the sloganeering of the apparatchiks, but Hirsch makes the leap look easy. He portrays himself as under relentless siege from an insidious antagonist, and here he employs pure demagoguery. Demagogues need enemies, even invented ones: “the press”, “the Jews”, “the reds”—each played the part historically. But “ed school professors”? Teachers manipulated by a “covering idea” turning into propagandists of the authoritarian state? It seems utterly preposterous.
But wait, there’s more:
The public schools in a democracy should not take sides in still-disputed areas. Gay marriage comes to mind. Children are required to attend school. They must not be compelled to attend a school that inculcates ideas that their parents and caregivers find repugnant. The Untied States, because of its history of religious refuge, has a first-rate tradition of cultural sensitivity—for example, in the way it has treated Amish beliefs and sensibilities… Deeply inbred in our history and law is the principle that this tolerant civil polity will trump each intolerant sect that tries to control other sects or antisects. (pp. 113-114).

After all the bloviating, it’s unclear whether we should or we shouldn’t mention gay marriage—it came, after all, to his mind, why wouldn’t it come to the minds of others? What intolerant sect is he indicting? Don’t ask, don’t tell.
Hirsch is really a born polemicist (and not a very good one at that) but apparently feels it necessary to dress up in scientific drag and parade his polemics as scholarship—he wants these salvos taken seriously. He hopes, and based on past success has reason to believe, that as long as he labors in the credulous fields of school reform he can get by as a lab rat. But while a good polemicist often writes biting sentences, they must be minimally recognizable to the opposition. When Hirsch defends using good literature for children in classrooms, for example, and writes, “But stories are not necessarily the same thing as ephemeral fictions” (p. 78), the weaknesses in his thinking and his writing are on full display—there is, after all, no one who will stand and defend ephemeral fictions as the same thing as excellent stories. Similarly, when he sums up the writings of John Dewey, “the father of present-day American education” (p. 5) (Read: the bad stuff), as “the conviction that children would learn what they needed by engaging in practical activities such as cooking” (pp. 9-10), he is dissembling and throwing buckets of sand—or diced onions—in our eyes.
Further a good polemicist goes to the heart of the matter, relying on the power of characterization and critique to unmask the stupidity or hypocrisy of the opposition: Hirsch, on the other hand, dallies in the shallows, reminding us again and again that his arguments are solid and research-based, that “my aims… are entirely constructive” (p. 17), or that “this book makes strong arguments…” (p. 16). If a graduate student paper contained assertions like these, I’d write all over the margins in red: “Let us be the judge of that.”
And, no, in fact in this book he does not make strong arguments. It’s scholastic at best, not scholarly. Hirsch is for content-driven, knowledge-based curriculum—he repeats the phrase like a mantra until our eyes are feeling heavy—but even when he himself asks, so “what exactly does that enabling knowledge consist of?” (p. 74) he shrinks back and refuses to answer. Where’s the honesty of Charles Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind? He promotes an “adequate scientific theory of reading” (p. 127), but never produces one. Where’s the forcefulness of a Mr. McChokumchild?
What Hirsch is busy avoiding is the obvious—any sensible and serious effort at school improvement must address several challenges simultaneously: the scandal of unequal funding and the inequitable distribution of education resources, the inadequate system of support and reward for teachers, the over-reliance on bureaucratic control and simplistic scales of student success, the loss of focus on the large goal of supporting youngsters to develop into functioning citizens and producers of both wealth and culture. These are complex challenges, to be sure, and must be worked out on the ground. But addressing these challenges is essential if we are to build outstanding schools fit for a democratic society.
As one of the major intellectual defenders of the triumphant conservative agenda in education E.D. Hirsch is a terrible disappointment. He’s simply not up to the task. He’s selling his Core Knowledge Foundation products, true—you can practically see the 800 number subliminally embedded on every page—but that’s about it. So here’s a time-saving suggestion: skip the ad—this book—and go straight to the handsome website of the Core Knowledge Foundation. You’ll get the whole bit delivered in power point in about five minutes.

TRUDGE TOWARD FREEDOM

2006-06-12T14:11:00.000-05:00

Research, Social Justice, and a Brief for the Conduct of Intellectual Life

William Ayers

William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago, author or editor of fourteen books on education including The Good Preschool Teacher: Six Teachers Reflect on Their Lives (Teachers College Press), A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court (Beacon Press), Teaching Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action in the Classroom, and Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice (Teachers College Press).
ABSTRACT
In this essay the author champions the idea that educational researchers can gain sustenance and perspective by drawing explicitly on humanism and the arts in their search for knowledge and understanding. In our research, our teaching, and all our scholarly enterprises, our concerns emanate from central humanist goals: enlightenment and emancipation, human knowledge and human freedom. The author outlines an approach to educational inquiry that appeals to an expansive view of humanity focused on questions like, what interests does our research serve? What forms of inquiry might encourage people to be more creative and active problem solvers? How? Drawing on a handful of scholars’ reflections, he offers a framework for the conduct of intellectual life.
Gwendolyn Brooks, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954, and served as Poet Laureate of Illinois from 1985 until her death in 2000, never left her bustling and bracing neighborhood, and, perhaps more important, never left the commitments and concerns that animated her intelligence and her heart: the lives of the children and families, indeed, the lives of all the ordinary people of Chicago’s South Side. At a massive celebration of her life, one of her former students read this poem to her memory:
GWENDOLYN BROOKS
(1917-2000)

Sometimes I see in my mind’s eye a four- or five-
year-old boy, coatless and wandering
a windblown and vacant lot or street in Chicago
on the windblown South Side. He disappears
but stays with me, staring and pronouncing
me guilty of an indifference more callous
than neglect, condescension as self-pity.

Then I see him again, at ten or fifteen, on the corner,
say, 47th and Martin Luther King, or in a group
of men surrounding a burning barrel off Lawndale,
everything surrounding vacant or for sale.
Sometimes I trace him on the train to Joliet
or Menard, such towns quickly becoming native
ground to these boys who seem to be nobody’s
sons, these boys who are so hard to love, so hard
to see, except as case studies.

Poverty, pain, shame, one and a half million
dreams deemed fit only for the most internal
of exiles. That four-year-old wandering
the wind tunnels of Robert Taylor, of Cabrini
Green, wind chill of an as yet unplumbed degree—
a young boy she did not have to know to love.

—Anthony Walton

There’s a dissent in this poem that mirrors the life and work of Gwendolyn Brooks—a refusal of received wisdom, a challenge to the policing proclivities of the social sciences, and an invitation to a possible way forward.
Sketching a familiar landscape, cycling back through the clichés attached so glibly to the city and city kids—coatless and wandering, the windblown streets and the vacant lots—Walton highlights the disciplining bent of some social research—“so hard/to see, except as case studies.” He doesn’t question the predicament of these kids so much as he points to us, questioning our innocence and reproaching our willed myopia. He undermines the received wisdom that had slipped so easily into place (“an indifference more callous/than neglect,” he writes, “condescension as self-pity”) and he asks us in that sudden, surprising last line (“a young boy she did not have to know to love”) to go more deeply, to see beyond a single dimension, to seek out cause and context. Indeed, here is the common faith of educators, not a distinct path, but a possible direction to pursue.
I begin deliberately with a poem in an effort to remind us of the centrality of humanism as principle, guide, and source in our scholarly and intellectual pursuits—our lives as students, our efforts as teachers, our projects as researchers. And I begin with the humanist poet Gwendolyn Brooks precisely because she imagines a disruptive role for the arts: “Does man love art?” she asks to begin one of her poems. Her answer: “Man visits art but cringes. Art hurts. Art urges voyages.” The arts are geared to fire and free the imagination—at their best they urge voyages, voyages that we undertake with a necessary sense of urgency at this precise moment, voyages that might contribute to opening the desicated discourse on educational research and school improvement so dominant just now.
In a concise and provocative way, this poem invites us—in the spirit of Gwendolyn Brooks—to open our eyes to our shared humanity, to challenge orthodoxy, and to engage our shared world with more imagination and hope.
Educational scholars and researchers might draw sustenance and perspective from poetry, from the arts, in our search for knowledge and understanding, our quest to see the world as it really is. Our main goals, after all, are the central tenets of humanism: enlightenment and human knowledge, emancipation and human freedom. The humanist ambition is for every human being to reach a fuller measure of his or her own humanity. Any research grounded in the humanist tradition is necessarily aimed in this direction, and it is open, then, to becoming a raucous and participatory pursuit—inviting every background and class and condition in its perpetual asking of new questions, its continual discoveries, its ceaseless and essential reformulations and revisions and unique revelations. Once we posit humanism as standard, then whatever we find that is out-of-balance must be challenged, the devastating taken-for-granted dissected, exposed, illuminated. Whatever else we bring to our research, our teaching, and our scholarly enterprises the core of all our work is built upon the search for wisdom and liberation. In other words, humanism needs always to be present, and its presence acknowledged.
* * *
Humanism is built upon the idea that human life is indeterminate, expansive, and interconnected, and that there is a special human capacity for knowledge of who and what we are in the world. Humanism embraces all the things we can make through our own labor, including history as an ongoing human construction, and every other form of expression as well: language and research and all manner of goods and works and products. Indeed, just as researchers can benefit from seeking their humanist nucleus and heart, every humanist is always a kind of researcher, drawn—in the spirit of cooperation, sharing, and being-in-common—to explore, to expand.
This exploration requires a leaning outward, a willingness to look at the peopled world, at the sufferings, the accomplishments, the perspectives and the concerns of others, at their twisty, dynamic movement through time, and an awareness—sometimes joyous, but just as often painful—of all that one finds. It requires, as well, a leaning inward toward self-knowledge, a sense of being alive and conscious in a going world.
In each direction the humanist/researcher acknowledges that every person is entangled and propelled, and sometimes made mute, by a social surround, and that each also has a wild and vast inner life. Going inward without consciously connecting to a larger world leads to self-referencing and worse, narcissism as truth; traveling outward without noting your own embodied, situated heart and mind can lead to ethical astigmatism, to seeing other three-dimensional human beings as case studies or data, their lived situations reduced to “my field.”
C. Wright Mills (1963), sociologist and passionately engaged intellectual, reminds students and young scholars that “the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community… do not split their work from their lives. They…take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other.” (p. 195) Mills sees this dissociation as endemic and epidemic, seductive and utterly corrosive. For Mills consistent and disciplined attention to both work and life is necessary for the most propulsive and worthwhile scholarly efforts.
Mills encourages us to cultivate the ability to simultaneously trust and be skeptical of our personal experiences; to enhance our scholarly production with personal insight, and to adjust our life course as we learn and understand more. “The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is,” Antonio Gramsci (1971) wrote in his Prison Notebooks, “and is ‘knowing oneself’ as a product of the historic process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” (p.73) Gramsci’s sense—a sense shared by Mills—is of the infinite and the ineffable tied up inexorably with the concrete and the real. Mills asks us to be conscious of people as social and historical actors in all their wild variety, to keep our eyes open to the largest images of humanity we can conjure, and to a powerful sense of history as something being made and remade by actual people, including us. Personal problems have, then, an often hidden but nonetheless insistent social and shared aspect; social problems and issues naturally have particular and individual iterations and consequences. Life is made in the balance and in the tension of both, in the dialectically developing consciousness of each. Scholarship must somehow work, as well, within this apparent contradiction.
Of course, being conscious can never be fully conscious—we are all more-or-less conscious, contingently aware, and at the same time entirely incomplete. As researchers and humanists we must struggle to approach others as active knowledge-creators and meaning-makers themselves, as agents and experts on their own lives; we might approach ourselves as works-in-progress too, both incomplete and provisional.
But while acknowledging humanization as goal and purpose, we note that dehumanization can be both policy and practice; we enter then, the contested space of school and society, of scholarship and intellectual life, of teaching and research.
* * *
The literary critic Edward Said explores this contested space in much of his work, but perhaps most pointedly in Representations of the Intellectual (Said, 1994) in which he offers in effect a brief for the ethical and lively conduct of intellectual life. The book is crisp, concise, small in size—the perfect companion to cram into your backpack between your toothbrush and your bottle of water, and as necessary a part of daily survival as either of those.
The intellectual, he argues, must strive to become “an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public.” (p. 11) For Said “this role has an edge to it,” for the intellectual must recognize the necessity of opening spaces “to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than to produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison de’etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.” (p. 12)
Said notes that “the world is more crowded than it ever has been with professionals, experts, consultants, in a word with intellectuals” (xv), and that this creates as a central task the requirement to search out and fight for relative independence from all manner of social and institutional pressures, to authentically choose oneself against a hard wall of facts: “At bottom,” Said argues, “the intellectual…is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical…sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do,” (p. 23)—a description befitting Anthony Walton’s poem. This unwillingness cannot be simply a passive shrug or a cynical sigh. For Said, as for Gwendolyn Brooks, the unwillingness to accede involves publicly staking out a space of refusal.
Said speaks for a particular stance, a distinct approach to intellectual life: all intellectuals, he argues, “represent something to their audiences, and in so doing represent themselves to themselves,” (xv) Whether you’re a straight-up academic or a free-lance writer, a down-and-out bohemian essayist or an itinerant speech-maker, an educational researcher or a teacher or a consultant to corporations or the state, you represent yourself based on an idea you have of yourself and your function: Do you think you’re providing a balanced, disinterested view, or are you delivering objective advice for pay? Are you an expert offering high-level program evaluation, or are you teaching your students some essential truth? Perhaps you imagine you’re advocating an eccentric if important idea. What do you want to represent? To whom? For what purpose? Toward what end, and in the interest of what social order?
Said exhorts intellectuals to work on the basis of a particular principle he takes to be universal: “that all human beings are entitled to expect decent standards of behavior concerning freedom and justice from worldly powers or nations, and that deliberate or inadvertent violations of these standards need to be testified and fought against courageously.” (11-12) This might become the fulcrum for us, the central and primary plot point, although it in no way lays out a neat road forward—choose the way of opposition and you do not inherit a set of ready-made slogans nor a nifty, easy-fit party line. There are no certainties—and for some this might prove difficult, perhaps even fatal—nor any gods whatsoever who can be called upon to ease specific, personal responsibility, to settle things once and for all. Each of us is out there on our own, with our own minds and our own hearts, our own ability to empathize, to touch and to feel, to recognize humanity in its many unexpected postures, to construct our own standards of truth about human suffering that must be upheld despite everything. “Real intellectuals,” Said writes, “are never more themselves than when, moved by metaphysical passion and disinterested principles of justice and truth, they denounce corruption, defend the weak, defy imperfect or oppressive authority.” (p. 6) Said is uninterested in allying with the victors and the rulers whose very stability he sees as a kind of “ state of emergency” for the less fortunate; he chooses instead to account for “the experience of subordination itself, as well as the memory of forgotten voices and persons.” (p. 35)
Said returns again and again to the notion of the authentic intellectual as a person who chooses to create an identity in part as exile—restless, in-motion, unsettled and unsettling, a person who does not feel entirely at home in his or her home—and in part as amateur—exuberant, passionate, committed and full of delight. The intellectual lives willfully as an engaged outsider, a gratified if uncomfortable disrupter of the status quo, an advocate, a critic of orthodoxy and dogma, stereotype and received wisdom of every kind, all the reductive categories that limit human thought and communication. Said’s intellectual works hard to maintain a kind of doubleness—something akin, I think, to DuBois’ double consciousness in which African-Americans were compelled, he argued, to see society and the world as both Americans and simultaneously as Black people, this duality being a synthesis, and therefore greater than either perspective alone. Said urges us to see our individual and collective situations in this way, as both insiders and outsiders, participants in the fullness of social life but simultaneously removed from and slightly tangent to our associations. We must cultivate, then, a state of steady alertness if we are to speak the unwelcome truth—as we understand it—to power.
This does not mean that intellectuals are required to be, in Said’s term, “humorless complainers,” nor whiny Cassandras—a character who, he points out, was not only unpleasant but unheard. It does mean that intellectuals work at “scouring alternative sources, exhuming buried documents, reviving forgotten (or abandoned) histories and peoples” (p. xviii). This, for Said, can be “a lonely condition, yes, but it is always a better one than a gregarious tolerance for the way things are.” (p. xviii)
“It is a spirit in opposition, rather than in accommodation,” Said writes, “that grips me because the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to be found in dissent against the status quo at a time when the struggle on behalf of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighted against them.” (p. xv) This points toward a research ideal we might strive toward, and it illuminates as well a series of pitfalls and problems that must somehow be met and engaged. The ideal is knowledge, enlightenment, and truth on the one hand, and on the other, human freedom, emancipation, liberation for all, with emphasis on the dispossessed. That this core of humanism is unachievable in some ultimate or final form might be discouraging to some, but it does set a standard within our existential boundaries, and provides, then, both focus and energy for our efforts.
In the world of teaching and learning, of schooling and education, Said’s concept of the intellectual’s role resonates with particular force. We live in a time when the assault on disadvantaged communities is particularly harsh and at the same time gallingly obfuscated. Access to adequate resources and decent facilities, to relevant curriculum, to opportunities to reflect on and to think critically about the world is unevenly distributed along predictable lines of class and color. Further, a movement to dismantle public schools under the rubric of “zero tolerance,” “standards and accountability,” and “privatization,” is in place and gaining force. This is the moment within which we have to choose who to be as scholars and intellectuals, as teachers and researchers, as citizens.
* * *
Howard Zinn (1997), the eminent historian and activist scholar who has written about these issues for decades, bemoans the honor, status, prestige and pay academics garner “for producing the largest number of inconsequential studies in the history of civilization.” (Zinn, 1997, p. 499) Zinn insists that we take note of and remember what motivated us to become teachers, scholars, scientists in the first place: we wanted to save lives, expand happiness, enable others to live more fully and freely. All of this is somehow rendered suspect in the insistent call for neutrality, objectivity, disinterested and discipline-based inquiry. His indictment: “Like politicians we have thrived on public innocence, with this difference: the politicians are paid for caring, when they really don’t; we are paid for not caring, when we really do” (pp. 499-500). Like Said and Mills he is urgent to resurrect the intellectual as engaged and caring, to close the “gap between the products of scholarly activity and the needs of a troubled world.” (p. 500), to challenge the tenets of professional mythology, and to resist a situation where we publish while others perish.
Toward this end Zinn points out several commonplaces that undermine clear thought and humanistic judgment in all the intellectual precincts, from research project to academy to school to journal. These include the injunctions to: carry on only “disinterested scholarship”; “be objective”; “stick to your discipline”; remember that “scientific” means “neutral”; and believe that there is no room in the world of ideas for something as suspect as passion, love, or emotions.
Zinn’s refutation of these commandments begins with a defense of knowledge as a form of power, a particular kind of power that can be employed against the naked power of brute force. Knowledge has the power to undermine and, perhaps, to overthrow force. But to do so, knowledge must be freely sought, explicitly linked to moral purposes, and tied to conduct. It must stand for something.
Universities are, of course, multimillion dollar enterprises governed by boards of trustees who oversee their operations. These boards are often the equivalent of millionaire clubs, overwhelmingly represented by the owners of the means of production and information, the captains of the military-industrial complex. Such people are not neutral, and the disinterested university is mostly myth. The only question in this twisty, distorted, and always contested context is what and whose interests will be served, and by whom.
Within this disputed space objectivity is not a self-evident good. “If to be objective is to be scrupulously careful about reporting accurately what one sees,” Zinn writes, “then of course, this is laudable” (p. 504). If, for example, “objectivity” were to mean getting all the facts, data, and grounds one can, and making judgments in light of that, well, of course. But, Zinn points out, while a metalsmith would be a fool to tinker or deceive in regard to accurate and reliable measurements, if “the metalsmith has determined in advance that he prefers a plowshare [to a sword]” (p. 504), that determination in no way asks for distorted measurements. Just so a scholar: that she prefers peace to war, national sovereignty to occupation, and women’s equality to patriarchy requires no distortion.
Calls for “balance” in teaching and scholarship, which draw force from a perceived tie to “objectivity,” are similarly peculiar and precarious. If the purpose of education is to seek the truth through evidence and argument, “balance” could only sensibly mean: Find and present all the evidence you can. If by “balance” people mean the equal presentation of contradictory perspectives, the classroom and the scholarly journal become little more than sites of incessant bickering. But the classroom task, the obligation of the scholarly journal, is not quibbling, but achievement of judgment based on the widest and deepest available evidence. This means open debate, continuous inquiry, dialogue, and taking a stand. In reality calls for “balance” are often in the service of a particular ideology. If an historian speaks about Palestinian rights at Columbia University today, for example, the call goes up for “balance.” If an Israeli diplomat defends Israeli policies at the same place, there is no comparable hue and cry.
As with “objectivity” and “balance,” so it goes with educational “research,” an enterprise as we know it today constructed and catapulted after World War II on a wave of federal money. In education a sentence that begins, “The research says…” is too-often meant to silence debate. It evokes Science, which is assumed to be larger than life: the expected response is awe and genuflection. It functions as a kind of bludgeon wielded on several sides of the school wars. It’s contrapositive—“There is no research that shows”—plays a similar role in quashing discussion. So, for example, a principal in Chicago, resisting the idea of bringing in a literature unit based on rap poetry, told me recently that there is no research that links studying rap with improved test scores. This may be true, but when I pointed out that Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was required reading, and asked what research links the study of Shakespeare to higher scores, he said I was being ridiculous.
“Science is a great and worthy mistress,” W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “but there is one greater and that is Humanity which science serves…” (DuBois, 2001, p. 42). It’s important to underline the point: research cannot be neutral. It occurs in contexts, in an historic flow, a cultural surround, a social and economic condition. It serves humanity—or some other mistress. Like education, it is designed either to perpetuate the status quo or to take the side of the disadvantage and underrepresented, to stand for humanization or to accede to dehumanization.
But if not on objectivity, balance, and research, upon what base does a claim for attention rest? Here things get sticky. For many academics that claim is primarily one of status, pedigree, affiliation, or the mantle of science. I’m reminded of the comment of my then-five-year-old son, Malik, at the awarding of my doctorate: “You’re a doctor, right?” he asked brightly. “But not the kind who can help anybody, right?” Right. I thought then of the wisdom of the Wizard of Oz, handing over a diploma—a Th.D., Doctor of Thinkology—to the elated and suddenly notably less hapless Scarecrow: There are plenty of professors who haven’t any more brains than you have, says the Wizard. The one thing they have that you don’t is a diploma.
The alternative to status claims is to claim authority on the basis of content, on the power of evidence and argument, the representation of ideas to and for a public. Mills argues that academics create for themselves a vicious circle: in order to claim status, they too-often adopt an obscure, impenetrable style; yet that grandly opaque style too-often contributes to isolation and peripheral status. For Mills, intellectuals must break the cycle and fight toward clarity of both substance and style: “To overcome the academic prose,” he writes, “you have first to overcome the academic pose” (p. 219). He urges intellectuals to clarify as honestly as they can the claims they offer, the actual difficulty of their subjects, and the audiences they hope to reach.
If there is an urgency to the researcher’s or scholar’s message—a real belief that the content matters—the prose tends toward directness. I urge my students to imagine themselves in an auditorium filled with educators—teachers, administrators, some academics. They are to address the assembly on an issue of immediate importance, something they themselves think and care about. They intend to be informed by, but not enslaved to, their inquiry, their research, their data. This clears away much of the performative underbrush. Cut the bullshit: Speak!
* * *
There is no one better positioned than Edward Said to offer advice on the conduct of intellectual life. At the time of his death in September, 2003 he was perhaps the best known intellectual in the world with millions of readers who saw him variously as a renowned professor of comparative literature, a cultural theorist, a musician, music critic, and (with maestro Daniel Barenboim) musical activist, and, with growing urgency over the last thirty-five years, the most passionate, eloquent, and clear-eyed advocate for the rights of the Palestinian people. Idolized and despised, venerated and denounced, Said was impossible to ignore.
The scope of his interests, the depth of his ambitions, the energy and effort invested in every project was vast, and yet each somehow informed and was influenced by the others, and each was animated by his understanding of humanism as universal, inclusive, communitarian, and democratic. Daniel Barenboim (2005) insists that Said had a “musician’s soul” (p. 163), and he traces Said’s fierce antispecialization, his sense of interconnectedness and inclusion, his distinction between power and force, volume and intensity—all insights of a musician—from his work in music to other fields. Said’s great work on Orientatism—which spawned the field of postcolonial studies, a field Said would go on to criticize and question as it developed its own lazy habits and received wisdom—was written and published after 1967, when Said was brought into Palestinian politics for the first time. Linkages abound around issues of conflicting narratives, visibility, and human rights.
As an advocate for Palestinian rights Said was unparalleled and yet he was not a spokesman in any conventional sense, for he held no office whatsoever, nor was he ever a mouth-piece for power. Indeed his criticisms of the official Palestinian leadership were both withering and relentless, keeping with his consistent injunction to oppose all orthodoxy, especially the lazy reductiveness or corruption or failures of those with whom one shares an affinity. Said in regard to Palestine was a powerful public example of someone with a mind of his own, arguing with himself without ever losing sight of the larger contexts of suffering and oppression.
Still the Palestinians had no more powerful champion. Said (2004) argued that “Humanism… must excavate the silences, the world of memory, of itinerant, barely surviving groups, the places of exclusion and invisibility, the kind of testimony that doesn’t make it into the reports” (p. 81). To this end he made it his business to keep talking about Palestine, to say again and again and again—whether he thought anyone was listening or not—that the Palestinian people exist, and that while they have the sorry fate of being the victims of the 20th Century’s emblematic victims, they still have the same rights as any other people. Because all human beings are entitled to the same standards in regard to justice and freedom, Palestinians must be recognized; there simply is no sensible refutation to that self-evident if inconvenient fact. Against the most high-powered propaganda barrage, in the face of threats and smear campaigns, cancellations of talks and spurious “investigations,” Said stubbornly stood his ground and spoke of Palestinians.
His book-length essay After the Last Sky (Said, 1999) written with the Swiss photographer, Jean Mohr, provides an extended reflection on the lives of Palestinians, and fulfills his injunction to “excavate the silences.” In it he portrays Palestinians, reflects on the images the wider world has of them as well as the images they have of themselves. He maps the corrosive dimensions of occupation, and clarifies the basic human need for people to narrate their own stories in order to move forward.
It is for the Palestinian people themselves “to provide the answer that power and paranoia cannot” (Said, 2004, p. 51), he wrote in Al-Ahram and Al-Hayat in 2001. That answer “can only come from moral vision” based on a common humanity, and never from “pragmatism” nor “practicality”: “If we are all to live—this is our imperative—we must capture the imagination not just of our people but of our oppressors.” (p. 51) In order to accomplish that, Palestinians must “abide by humane democratic values” (p. 51). The moral vision must be “based on equality and inclusion rather than on apartheid and exclusion.” (p. 56) This is a humanist response to a very human tragedy.
* * *
Human beings, and particularly intellectuals and researchers, are driven by a long, continuous: “I don’t know.” It is, after all, not the known that pushes and pull us along, although we must be serious about preparation, work, discipline, and labor. Doing research can be hard work, and a researcher can feel (if she is like others who’ve gone down this path) as if she’s crashed into a wall—overwhelmed, uncertain, deeply confused and dislocated in turn. But if she stays with it, if she dives into the wreckage, she will likely find moments of relief, exhilaration, self-discovery, and even of joy.
There is a long tradition of scholarship whose avowed purpose is to combat silence, to defeat erasure and invisibility—this is research for social justice, research to resist harm and redress grievances, research with the explicit goal of promoting a more balanced, fair, and equitable social order. Several questions can serve as guideposts for this kind of inquiry:
∑ What are the issues that marginalized or disadvantaged people speak of with excitement, anger, fear, or hope?
∑ How can I enter a dialogue in which I will learn from a specific community itself about problems and obstacles they face?
∑ What endogenous experiences do people already have that can point the way toward solutions?
∑ What narrative is missing from the “official story” that will make the problems of the oppressed more understandable?
∑ What current or proposed policies serve the privileged and the powerful, and how are they made to appear inevitable?
∑ How can the public space for discussion, problem-posing and problem-solving, fuller and wider participation be expanded?
There is no single procedure, no computer program that will allow this work to take care of itself; there is no set of techniques that is orderly, efficient, and pretested that can provide complete distance from a phenomenon under study or from the process of inquiry itself. Researchers draw on judgment, experience, instinct, common sense, courage, reflection, further study. There is always more to know, always something in reserve. We’re never exactly comfortable, but neither are we numb or sleep-walking. We don’t get harmony, but we do get a kind of arching forward—always reaching, pursuing, longing, opening, rethinking.
Researchers must peer into the unknown and cultivate habits of vigilance and awareness, a radical openness, as we continually remind ourselves that in an infinite and expanding universe our ignorance is vast, our finiteness itself all the challenge we should need to propel ourselves forward. Knowing this, we nourish an imagination that’s defiant and limitless, and like the color blue or love or friendship, impossible to define without a maiming reductiveness. The goal is discovery and surprise, and in the end it is our gusto, our immersion, our urgency, enthusiasm, and raw nerve that will take us hurling toward the next horizon. We remind ourselves that the greatest work awaits us, and that we are never higher than when we’re not exactly certain where we’re going.
What interests, tendencies, or classes does our research precisely serve? What will invite people to become more aware, more critical, creative, active and productive, more free? While researchers might never know definitively how to answer these questions a priori, a certain angle of regard might help each of us to make sounder judgments, to construct a more hopeful and workable standard by which we can examine our efforts. We begin by recognizing that every human being, no matter who, is a gooey biological wonder, pulsing with the breath and beat of life itself, eating, sleeping, pissing and shitting, prodded by sexual urges, evolved and evolving, shaped by genetics, twisted and gnarled and hammered by the unique experiences of living. Every human being also has a unique and complex set of circumstances that makes his or her life understandable and sensible, bearable or unbearable. This recognition asks us to reject any action that treats anyone as an object, any gesture that thingifies human beings. It demands that we embrace the humanity of every student and every research collaborator, that we take their side.
What are the challenges to human beings today? What does the hope for democracy demand now? Edward Said points out that “Our country is first of all an extremely diverse immigrant society, with fantastic resources and accomplishments, but it also contains a redoubtable set of internal inequities and external interventions that cannot be ignored.” (Said 1994, p. 99) We are faced with the enduring stain of racism and the ever more elusive and intractable barriers to racial justice, the rapidly widening gulf between rich and poor, and the enthronement of greed. We are faced as well with aggressive economic and military adventures abroad, the macho posturing of men bonding in groups and enacting a kind of theatrical but no less real militarism, the violence of conquest and occupation from the Middle East and Central Asia to South America.
Encountering these facts thrusts us into the realm of human agency and choice, the battlefield of social action and change, where we come face to face with some stubborn questions: Can we, perhaps, stop the suffering? Can we alleviate at least some of the pain? Can we repair any of the loss? There are deeper considerations: can society be changed at all? Is it remotely possible—not inevitable, certainly, perhaps not even likely—for people to come together freely, to imagine a more just and peaceful social order, to join hands and organize for something better, and to win? Can we do anything?
If a fairer, more sane and just social order is both desirable and possible, if some of us can join one another to imagine and build a participatory movement for justice, a public space for the enactment of democratic dreams, our field opens slightly. There would still be much to be done, for nothing would be entirely settled. We would still need to find ways to stir ourselves and our students from passivity, cynicism, and despair, to reach beyond the superficial barriers that wall us off from one another, to resist the flattening social evils like institutionalized racism, to shake off the anesthetizing impact of the authoritative, official voices that dominate so much of our space, to release our imaginations and act on behalf of what the known demands, linking our conduct firmly to our consciousness. We would need to reconceptualize ourselves as “stunt-intellectuals,” the ones who are called upon when the other intellectuals refuse to jump off the bridge. We would be moving, then, without guarantees, but with purpose and with some small spark of hope.
* * *
In 1967 at the age of 50, with the rat-tat-tat of revolution in the air, and an exuberant sense of change sweeping throughout the whole world, Gwendolyn Brooks—with several books of poetry, a novel, and a Pulitzer Prize under her belt—wrote of the grand rebirth of consciousness during the early days of the Black Arts Movement:
I who have ‘gone the gamut’ from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin… to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun—am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress.
I have hopes for myself. (In Alexander, 2004, p. 44).

“New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress”—we’re reminded that it is only the urgency of youth that can set the pace and the tone of what is to come, of what is to be done, and still, in the grace and fullness of age we might learn to follow along, to enter at least the kindergarten of the new. Because I have hopes for my students and my young colleagues, because I have ambitions for my children and my grand-daughter, I also have hopes for myself.
References

Alexander, E. (2004). The black interior. St. Paul: Graywolf.

Barenboim, D. (2005). “Maestro.” In: Homi Bhabha and W.J.T. Michell, eds. Edward Said: Continuing the conversation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 163-167.

DuBois, W.E.B. (2001). The education of black people: Ten critiques 1906-1960. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Gramsci, A. (1971). The prison notebooks: Selections. Translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. New York: International Publishers.

Mills, C.W. (1963). Power, politics, and people: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills. Irving Louis Horowitz, ed. New York: Ballantine.

Said, E.W. (1994). Representations of the intellectual. New York: Pantheon.

Said, E.W. (1999). After the last sky: Palestinian lives. New York: Columbia University Press.

Said, E.W. (2004A). From Oslo to Iraq and the road map: Essays. New York: Vintage Books.

Said, E.W. (2004B). Humanism and democratic criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Zinn, H. (1997). The Zinn reader: Writings on disobedience and democracy. New York: Seven Stories.

Dear Genay,

2006-06-12T14:08:00.000-05:00

June 5, 2006

Justice means that all human beings are entitled to fair, equitable, and decent standards of action and behavior from worldly powers or nations or institutions, and that violations of these standards must be exposed, testified to, and fought. Justice demands participatory democracy, the injunction that people be allowed to participate in all the decisions that effect their lives. Further, justice means that no one’s condition be allowed to become so emiserated that he or she is forced to sell herself to survive, and no one’s be so exalted that he can buy or sell another human being. There’s a lot of open space here, it’s true, but justice is working within those open spaces in the mud and muck of the real world and in the swirl of changing conditions.
The American war against Viet Nam was illegal and unjust. It was murderous and brutal, and My Lai, while not necessarily a daily occurrence, was emblematic of the war: an invading group of foreigners running amok against a peasant population. This is like Wounded Knee, which was emblematic of the conquest of Native Americans, and the currently uncovered murders of civilians by US Marines in Iraq. And how do the powerful respond? “We’ll have more training in the core values of the Corps,” they say. What? You forgot to tell them not to murder babies and children in their homes? It’s a lie. Occupation by an invader always involves patronization of the “exotic” and sensationalization of their pitiful condition, demonization of the “enemy,” dehumanization of the “other,” and then routine humiliation and oppression with occasional extravagant outbursts of murderous acts. This is the way it is. But remember, while the world may not be decolonized yet, your mind is your own—don’t let anyone colonize you.
The media lied and lied and lied—although some individual reporters risked speaking the truth. Don’t over rely on the bought media or the profit-making press to bring you the facts or to affirm your existence, identity, or struggle.

Dear Andy,

2006-06-12T14:06:00.000-05:00

June 5, 2006

I was first arrested opposing the American war against Viet Nam in October 1965. Thirty-nine of us were arrested disrupting a draft board by blocking the entrances and throwing files around. The war was illegal and unjust, and while I didn’t know much, I could see this plainly.
The Weather group was a faction of Students for a Democratic Society. I’d been a national officer—Education Secretary—of SDS and a founder of Weather when I was twenty-three-years-old. We went underground after an explosion killed my girl-friend and two other close friends, and we decided to stay free rather get entangled in the criminal justice nightmare. We wanted to survive what we saw as an impending American fascism in order to fight the empire. We wanted to organize the armed struggle.
We were (and are) radicals, which means we wanted fundamental, not superficial change. Radical means going to the root, connecting issues, analyzing deep causes of war, racism, exploitation and oppression.
We were never “terrorists,” never attacking people to frighten or coerce them. The US forces in Viet Nam were terrorists. I’m not a tactician, however, and I think tactics always have to flow from the conditions you find, and the goals you have. When we destroyed property, symbolic targets of war and racism, an overwhelming majority of Americans opposed the war as thousands of Vietnamese were being slaughtered every week in our name. We were the anti-terrorists.
I don’t know what we accomplished, but I’m sure we didn’t do enough. My biggest regret: my dogmatic, inflexible thinking, my intolerance of and impatience with potential allies. I don’t regret hurling myself against the war-mongers.

To Etta

2006-06-12T14:02:00.000-05:00

June 6, 2006

In some ways life underground was simply life—I worked, I hung out with friends, I read the newspaper and went to the movies, I cooked breakfast and dinner. In other ways it was extraordinary because we felt that our lives had a serious purpose that we were conscious of and earnest about every day: to end a war and overthrow a system—imperialism—that made war after war inevitable, and to upend centuries of racial oppression and white supremacy creating a society based on equality, justice, and love. We had high ideals, utopian dreams, and a deep, deep commitment to live it out, to create a life that didn’t make a mockery of our values.
“Enjoy” doesn’t quite capture the feeling of the experience. I’m predisposed to enjoy life—I sometimes joke that it’s a genetic flaw inherited from my mother—and I found joy and pleasure and happiness in every little detail—a walk through the city, watching a sunset, a meal with friends. And, of course, falling in love, having adventures, raising our children. But there’s something equally important, and that is the satisfaction that comes from making a decision to participate as fully as you can in building a better community, fighting against unnecessary suffering and pain, and struggling toward a fairer and more humane social order. There’s some deep satisfaction and enjoyment in trying to participate in history, and make the future.
The experience changed my life forever—made me see the world differently. All the privileges that come from being American, white, and on and on blind you to the fullness of life—the pain and the love, the joy and sorrow. Of course people are blind to their blindspots, anesthetized by comfort, and being underground I became an exile, an uncomfortable person, in my own land. The good thing is that that condition allowed me a kind of double vision, to see the world as an American and to see America as an outsider. There’s real advantages to that because if you become too comfortable, too at home, you will only ever know the walls of your own cave, and even if it has lots of glitter and color, it’s still just a cave. Freedom always lies beyond. And freedom requires us to overcome fear, to learn to act with courage, and then to doubt, and then to act again.
There’s always more. Read Fugitive Days.

Death in the Haymarket

2006-05-02T13:14:00.000-05:00

A book review for The Common Review.

The facts are clear: On May 1, 1886, 80,000 Chicago workers paraded down Michigan Avenue demanding an eight-hour work day for all wage-laborers. It was the opening salvo of a general strike organized by unionists and anarchists, socialists and revolutionaries, and it was largely successful. Industry ground to a halt all over town with one glaring exception—the huge McCormick Reaper Works was in full operation, manned by strikebreaking scabs protected by a large contingent of Chicago police.
On May 3, during a skirmish at the gates of the McCormick plant, police opened fire, killing four striking workers. Organizers immediately called for a rally the next day at the Haymarket on Desplaines Street; at 7:30 PM on May 4 over 1,500 people gathered to hear a range of speakers including the fiery agitator Albert Parsons who eloquently denounced the police killings, wage slavery, and the system of capitalism itself while calling for justice, an eight-hour-day, and a worker’s revolution.
As the rally was winding down, and only a few hundred people remained, a large contingent of policemen quick-marched up to the hay wagon that was serving as platform and podium, and just as suddenly a rocket came out of the crowd, landed on the street in the midst of the police, and exploded with terrific force; stunned police officers opened fire into the crowd and kept up a barrage of pistol and rifle fire for several minutes.
To this day no one knows who threw the bomb, nor how many people were actually killed or wounded in the chaos that followed. Within a week seven patrolmen were confirmed dead, as well as four workers who were felled by police bullets—“it seems probable,” writes James Green, “that at least 3 others died” (p. 191), and possibly many more. Three months later seven anarchists, including Albert Parsons, were convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged. Seven dead policemen, seven dead workers, seven condemned revolutionists, each a working man—these 21 formed, according to Green, “a haunting triangle of death.” (p. 191)
In Death in the Haymarket James Green maps the fault-lines in American labor’s long struggle for justice as he retells this dramatic story and locates it appropriately in the conflicts and upheavals of the time. In the tradition of Eric Hobsbaum, Edward Thompson, and Eric Foner, Green’s focus shifts effortlessly from thick descriptions of people and events on the ground to the widening circles—historical flow, cultural surround, economic condition—within which those events took place. Tracking back and forth from the tiniest of local detail to the largest and most sweeping of contexts, Green gives us both a compelling narrative of the Haymarket tragedy, and a layered understanding of its multiple meanings as they exploded out away from the event itself. Green combines his skills as an historian and researcher with a distinct literacy bent to create an account at once thorough and vivid. This is the best book ever written about the Haymarket.
James Green draws characters and scenes with such dazzling precision that they reawaken the purposes, conflicts, and tensions that must have powered events at the time; more even than that, the reader can feel the contemporary resonance of this “drama without end” (p. 10): the violence of the state, the limits of protest and speech, the ongoing struggle for justice, capital punishment, government repression, the manipulation of fear, and much more.
On November 11, 1887, four anarchists were hanged by the state of Illinois—the moment before their executions, August Spies cried out: “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today”; George Engel shouted in German, “Hurray for Anarchy!”; and Adolph Fischer said, “This is the happiest day of my life” (p. 270). Albert Parsons began “May I be allowed to speak?… Harken to the voice of the people”… before the trap door was sprung and his speech cut off (p. 270).
The outpouring for the massive public funeral a few days later eclipsed even Abraham Lincoln’s funeral procession in Chicago twenty-two years earlier. Emma Goldman marked these events as the inspiration for her life-long commitment to workers’ struggles, and labor figures from Mother Jones to Big Bill Haywood pointed to Haymarket as a defining moment in their lives. Albert Parson’s widow Lucy, a former slave, carried the legacy of Haymarket to union halls and political rallies until her death in 1942 at the age of eighty-nine.
Part of that legacy is the eight-hour-day and union rights, part the ongoing fight for human and civil rights. And part of that legacy is May Day, recognized the world around as Workers Day, and, ironically largely unknown in the US.
James Green captures it all, and gives us a definitive account of a germinal moment in American history.

Hearts and Minds

2006-04-20T15:33:00.000-05:00

Military recruitment in high schools is an epidemic today,distorting the purposes of education and putting poor kids and kids of color in harm's way.....

In Purple Hearts the documentary photographer Nina Berman (2004) presents forty photographs—two each of twenty US veterans of the American war in Iraq—plus a couple of accompanying paragraphs of commentary from each vet in his or her own words. Their comments cohere around their service, their sacrifice, their suffering. Purple Hearts bind them together—this award is their common experience, this distinction is what they embrace and what embraces them. This is what they live with.
Their views on war, on their time in arms, on where they hope they are headed with their lives are various, their sense-making about the US military mission wildly divergent. Josh Olson, 24-years-old, begins:
We bent over backwards for these people but they ended up screwing us over, stabbing us in the back. A lot of them, I mean, they’re going to have to be killed…

As Americans we’ve taken it upon ourselves to almost cure the world’s problems I guess, give everybody else a chance. I guess that’s how we’re good-hearted…

He’s missing his right leg now and was presented with his Purple Heart at Walter Reed Military Hospital by President Bush himself. He feels it all—pride, anger, loss.
Jermaine Lewis, 23, describes growing up in a Chicago neighborhood where “death has always been around.” He describes basic training as a place where “they break you down and then they try to build you up.” To him, the “reasons for going to war were bogus but we were right to go in there.”
The vets are all young, and several describe their decision to enlist when they were much younger, more innocent, more vulnerable but feeling somehow invincible. Jermaine Lewis says: “I’ve been dealing with the military since I was a sophomore in high school. They came to the school like six times a year all military branches. They had a recruiting station like a block from our high school. It was just right there.”
Tyson Johnson, III, 22, wanted to get away from the poverty and death he saw all around him. His life was going nowhere, he thought, and so he signed on: “And here I am, back here… I don’t know where it’s going to end up.”
Joseph Mosner enrolled when he was nineteen. “There was nothing out there,” he writes. “There was no good jobs so I figured this would have been a good thing.”
Frederick Allen thought going to war would be “jumping out of planes.” He joined up when recruiters came to his high school. “I thought it would be fun.”
Adam Zaremba, 20, also enlisted while still in high school: “The recruiter called the house, he was actually looking for my brother and he happened to get me. I think it was because I didn’t want to do homework for a while, and then I don’t know, you get to wear a cool uniform. It just went on from there. I still don’t even understand a lot about the army.” The Purple Heart seemed like a good thing from a distance, “But then when it happens you realize that you have to do something, or something has to happen to you in order to get it.”
* * *

Military recruiting in high schools has been a mainstay of the so-called all-volunteer armed forces from the start. High school kids are at an age when being a member of an identifiable group with a grand mission and a shared spirit—and never underestimate a distinctive uniform—is of exaggerated importance, something gang recruiters in big cities also note with interest and exploit with skill. Dobie (2005), quoting a military historian, notes that “‘Basic training has been essentially the same in every army in every age, because it works with the same raw material that’s always been there in teenage boys: a fair amount of aggression, a strong tendency to hang around in groups, and an absolute desperate desire to fit in.’” (p. 35) Being cool and going along with the crowd are big things. Add the matter of proving oneself to be a macho, strong, tough, capable person, combined with an unrealistic calculus of vulnerability and a constricted sense of options specifically in poor and working class communities—all of this creates the toxic mix in a young person’s head that can be a military recruiter’s dream.
One of the most effective recruitment tools is Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) which was established by an act of Congress in 1916 “to develop citizenship and responsibility in young people” by installing ROTC in high schools nationwide (Goodman, 2002). JROTC is now experiencing the most rapid expansion in its history. Some credit the upsurge to Colin Powell’s visit to South Central Los Angeles after the 1992 riots when he was head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Goodman, 2002). Powell stated that the solution to the problems of city youth was the kind of discipline and structure offered by the U.S. military. In the ensuing decade the number of JROTC programs doubled, with over half-a-million students enrolled at over 3,000 schools coast-to-coast, and a Pentagon budget allocation in excess of $250 million annually. Today the evidence is clear: 40% of JROTC graduates eventually join the military, making it a powerful recruiting device (Goodman, 2002).
Chicago has the largest JROTC program in the country and the “most militarized school system in America” (Goodman, 2002), with more than 9,000 students enrolled in 45 JROTC programs, including five Army and one Navy JROTC academies which are run as “schools-within-a-school,” and three full-time Army military academies. That distinction is only the start: Chicago is also in the vanguard of the Middle School Cadet Corps (MSCC) with 26 programs in Junior Highs and Middle Schools involving 850 kids, some as young as 11 (Wedekind, 2005).
Defenders of the JROTC and MSCC claim that the goal is leadership and citizen development, drop-out prevention, or simply the fun of dressing up and parading around. Skeptics point out that the Pentagon money pumped into schools provides needed resources for starving public schools, and question why the military has become such an important route to adequate school funding. Chicago spends $2.8 million on JROTC and another $5 million on two military academies—“more than it spends on any other special or magnet program” (Goodman, 2002)—and the Defense Department puts in an additional $600,000 for salaries and supplies.
There is no doubt that JROTC programs target poor, Black, and Latino kids who don’t have the widest range of options to begin with. Recruiters know where to go: Whitney Young High School, a large selective magnet school in Chicago, had seven military recruiter visits last year compared to 150 visits from university recruiters; Schurz High School, which is 80% Hispanic, had nine military and ten university visits. (Reed, 2005) Bob Herbert (2005) points out that all high schools are not equal in the eyes of the recruiters: “Schools with kids from wealthier families (and a high percentage of college-bound students) are not viewed as good prospects… The kids in those schools are not the kids who fight America’s wars.” Absent arts and sports programs or a generous array of clubs and activities, JROTC and its accompanying culture of war—militarism, aggression, violence, repression, the demonization of others, and mindless obedience—becomes the default choice for these kids.
The military culture seeps in at all levels and has a more generally corrosive impact on education itself, narrowing curriculum choices, promoting a model of teaching as training and learning as “just following orders.” In reality good teaching always involves thoughtful and complicated judgments, careful attention to relationships, complex choices about how to challenge and nurture each student. Good teachers are not drill instructors. Authentic learning, too, is multidimensional and requires the constant construction and reconstruction of knowledge built on expanding experiences.
The educational model that employs teachers to simply pour imperial gallons of facts into empty vessels—ridiculed by Charles Dickens 150 years ago and demolished as a path to learning by modern psychologists and educational researchers—is making a roaring comeback. The rise of the military in schools adds energy to that malignant effort. The popular language is revealing: classroom teachers, we’re told, work “in the trenches.”
A vibrant democratic culture requires free people with minds of their own capable of making independent judgments. Education in a democracy resists obedience and conformity in favor of free inquiry and the widest possible exploration. Obedience training may have a place in instructing dogs, but not in educating citizens.
* * *
Today, two years into the invasion of Iraq, recruiters are consistently failing to meet monthly enlistment quotas despite deep penetration into high schools, sponsorship of NASCAR and other sports events, and a $3 billion Pentagon recruitment budget. Increasingly, recruiters are offering higher bonuses and shortened tours of duty, and wide-spread violations of ethical guidelines and the military’s own putative standards are becoming common place—in one highly publicized case, a recruiter was heard on tape coaching a high school kid about how to fake a mandatory drug test. Recruiters lie: “One of the most common lies told by recruiters,” writes Kathy Dobie (2005) “is that it’s easy to get out of the military if you change your mind. But once they arrive at training, the recruits are told there’s no exit, period…” (p. 40) Recruiters lie and lie, and still the number of young people signing up is plummeting.
The military manpower crisis includes escalating desertions: 1,509 Army deserters in 1995 compared to 4,739 in 2001 (Dobie, 2005). According to an Army study, deserters tend to be children—“Younger when they enlist, less educated… come from ‘broken homes,’ and… ‘engaged in delinquent behavior…’” (p. 35). In times of war rates of desertion tend to spike upward, and so after 9/11 the “Army issued a new policy regarding deserters, hoping to staunch the flow” (p.34). The new rules required deserters to be returned to their units in the hope that they could be “integrated back into the ranks.” This has not been a happy circumstance for either soldiers or officers: “‘I can’t afford to baby-sit problem children every day’” (p.34), says one commander.
At the end of March, 2005 the Pentagon announced that the active-duty Army achieved only about 2/3 of its March goal, and was 3,973 recruits short for the year; the Army Reserve was 1,382 short of its year-to-date goal (Chicago Tribune, March 31, 2005, page 1). This has been, according to military statistics, the toughest recruiting year since 1973, the first year of the all-volunteer army. Americans don’t want to fight this war, and a huge investment in high school recruiting is the military’s latest desperate hope.
The high school itself has become a battlefield for hearts and minds. On one side, the power of the federal government, claims (often unsubstantiated) of financial benefits, humvees on school grounds, goody bags filled with donuts, key chains, video games and tee-shirts. Most ominous of all is “No Child Left Behind,” the controversial omnibus education bill passed in 2001—Section 9528 reverses policies in place in many cities banning organizations that discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation, including the military, and mandating that recruiters have the same access to students as colleges. The bill also requires schools to turn over students’ addresses and home phone numbers to the military unless parents expressly opt out. On the other side, a mounting death toll in Iraq, a growing sense among the citizenry that politicians lied and manipulated us at every turn in order to wage an aggressive war outside any broad popular interest, and something surprising and unprecedented: organized groups of parents mobilizing to oppose high school recruitment.
A front page story in the New York Times (Cave, 2005) reported a “Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents” (p. 1). The resistance to recruiters, according to the Times report, is spreading coast to coast, and, “was provoked by the very law that was supposed to make it easier for recruiters to reach students more directly. ‘No Child Left Behind’…is often the spark that ignites parental resistance.” (p.B6)
And parents, it turns out, can be a formidable obstacle to a volunteer army. Unlike the universal draft, which is the essential entry-point of a citizen-army with everyone, at least in theory, equally eligible, signing up requires an affirmative act, and parents can and often do exercise a strong negative drag on their kids’ stepping forward. A Department of Defense survey from November, 2004 found that “only 25 percent of parents would recommend military service to their children, down from 42 percent in August 2003.” (New York Times, p. 1)
In a column called “Uncle Sam Really Wants You”, Bob Herbert (2005) focuses attention on an Army publication called “School Recruiting Program Handbook.” The goal of the program is straightforward: “‘school ownership that can only lead to a greater number of Army enlistments.’” This means promoting military participation on every feasible dimension from making classroom presentations to involvement in Hispanic Heritage and Black History Month. The handbook recommends that recruiters contact athletic coaches and volunteer to lead calisthenics, get involved with the homecoming committee and organize a presence in the parade, donate coffee and donuts to the faculty on a regular basis, eat in the cafeteria, target “influential students” who, while they may not enlist, can refer others who might.
The military injunction—hierarchy, obedience, conformity, and aggression—stands in stark opposition to the democratic imperative of respect, cooperation, and equality. The noted New Zealand educator Sylvia Ashton-Warner (1963) wrote that war and peace—acknowledged or hidden—“wait and vie” in every classroom. She argued that all human beings are like volcanoes with two vents, one destructive and the other creative. If the creative vent is open, she argued, then the destructive vent will atrophy and close; on the other hand if the creative vent is shut down, the destructive will have free reign. “Creativity in this time of life,” she wrote, “when character can be influenced forever is the solution to the problem of war” (p. 100), and quoting Erich Fromm, “‘The amount of destructiveness in a child is proportionate to the amount to which the expansiveness of his life has been curtailed. Destructiveness is the outcome of the unlived life.’”
Bob Herbert, himself a combat vet from Viet Nam, is deeply troubled by the deceptive and manipulative tactics of recruiters: “Let the Army be honest and upfront in its recruitment,” he writes. “War is not child’s play, and warriors shouldn’t be assembled through the use of seductive sales pitches to youngsters too immature to make an informed decision on matters that might well result in them having to kill others, or being killed themselves.” A little truth-telling, then.
* * *
War is catastrophic for human beings, and, indeed, for the continuation of life on earth. With over 120 military bases around the globe and the largest military force ever assembled, the US government is engaged in a constant state of war, and American society is necessarily distorted and disfigured around the aims of war. Chris Hedges (2003) provides an annotated catalogue—unadorned, uninflected—to the catastrophe:
∑ 108 million people were slaughtered in wars during the 20th century. (p.1)
During the last decade of that spectacular century, 2 million children were killed, 20 million displaced, 6 million disabled.
∑ From 1900-1990 43 million soldiers died in wars and 62 million civilians were killed. In the wars of the 1990s the ratio was up: between 75-90% of all war deaths were civilian deaths (p.7)
∑ Today 21.3 million people are under arms—China has the largest military with 2.4 million people in service (from a population of 1.3 billion citizens), followed by the US with 1.4 million (from a population of 300 million) (p.1). About 1.3 million Americans are in Reserve and National Guard units (p.3).
∑ Vets suffer long-term health consequences including greater risk of depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, sleep disorders, and more. About 1/3 of Viet Nam vets suffered full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychiatric condition occurring after witnessing or participating in a traumatic event such as murder or rape. Another 22% suffered partial post-traumatic stress disorder. (Hedges, 2003, P. 115) This is the nature of the beast. Anyone who’s been there knows.
On and on, 119 densely packed pages, fact sheet upon fact sheet, twenty-four pages of evidentiary footnotes, fifteen pages of bibliography, all of it adding up to an inescapable conclusion: war is the greatest organized misfortune human beings have ever constructed and visited on one another. And as Adromache, captive widow of Hector, says at the opening of Seneca’s Trojan Women (1992): “It is not finished yet. There is always more and worse to fear, beyond imagination.” (p. 17). In the course of the play her young son will be thrown from a tower and murdered, and the daughter of Hecuba and Prian will also be sacrificed. Beyond imagination.
There are now more than 300,000 child soldiers worldwide (Hedges, 2003, p.8). Why do children join? Here is Hedges’ entire answer to that question: “They are often forced to. Some are given alcohol or drugs, or exposed to atrocities, to desensitize them to violence. Some join to help feed or protect their families. Some are offered up by their parents in exchange for protection. Children can be fearless because they lack a clear concept of death.” (p. 8)
The United States, the only nation which consistently refuses to ratify the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, agreed in 2002 to sign on to the “Optional Protocol” to the Convention, covering the involvement of children in armed conflicts. In its “Declarations and Reservations,” the US stipulated that signing the Protocol in no way carries any obligations under the Convention, and that “nothing in the Protocol establishes a basis for jurisdiction by any international tribunal, including the International Criminal Court.” It lists several other reservations, including an objection to Article 1 of the Protocol which states that “Parties shall take all feasible measures to ensure that members of their armed forces who have not attained the age of 18 years do not take direct part in hostilities.” The US stipulates that the term “feasible measures” means what is “practical” taking into account all circumstances “including humanitarian and military considerations,” and that it “does not mean indirect participation in hostilities, such as gathering and transmitting military information, transporting weapons, ammunition, or other supplies, or forward deployment.”
Because the recruiters lie, because the US steps back from international law and standards, and because the cost of an education for too-many poor and working-class kids is constructed as a trip through a mine-field and a deal with the devil, teachers should consider Bill Bigelow’s advice to make a critical examination of the “Enlistment/Reenlistment Document—Armed Forces of the United States” that recruits sign when they join up. (Copies can be downloaded as a PDF at rethinkingschools.org). There they will find a host of loopholes and disclaimers, like this in section 9b:
Laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice to me. Such changes may affect my status, pay, allowances, benefits, and responsibilities as a member of the armed forces regardless of the provisions of this enlistment/reenlistment document.

When Bigelow’s students analyzed the entire contract, they concluded that it would be more honest to simply say to kids something like, “Just sign up… Now you belong to us.” They offer sage advice to other students: “Read the contract thoroughly… Don’t sign unless you’re 100 percent sure, 100 percent of the time” (Bigelow, 2005, p. 46). One of Bigelow’s students who had suffered through the war in Bosnia recommended that students inclined to enlist might, “Shoot a bird, and then think about whether you can kill a human.” (p. 46)
* * *
Jermaine Lewis, the 23-year-old vet from Chicago who spoke about the war being “bogus” in the book Purple Hearts, always wanted to be a teacher, but worried about the low pay. Now, with both legs gone, he calculates that a teacher’s salary plus disability pay will earn him an adequate income: “So I want to go to college and study education—public school primarily middle school, six to eighth grade.” He went through the minefield to get what more privileged kids have access to without asking. It’s something.

Ashton-Warner, S. (1963) Teacher.
Berman, N. (2004). Purple hearts: Back from Iraq. New York: Trolley.
Bigelow, B. (2005). “The recruitment minefield.” Rethinking Schools, 19 (3) pp. 42-48.
Cave, D. (2005). “Growing problem for military recruiters: Parents.” New York Times, June 3, 2005.

Dobie, K. (2005). “AWOL in America.” Harper’s, March 2005, pp. 33-44.
Goodman, D. (2002). “Recruiting the class of 2005.” Mother Jones Magazine. January/February, 2002.

Hedges, C. (2003). What every person should know about war. New York: Free Press.
Herbert, B. (2005). “Uncle Sam really wants you.” New York Times, June 16, 2005, p. A29.

Reed, C.L. (2005). “Military finally gives Hispanic war dead proper recognition.” Chicago Sun Times, July 3, 2005, pp. 18A-19A.

Seneca (1992). Seneca: The tragedies, Volume I. Slavitt, D.R., editor. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Wedekind, G. (2005). “The children’s crusade.” In These Times, June 20, 2005 (pp. 6-7).

A Letter to a Young Comrade in Latin America

2006-04-20T15:26:00.000-05:00

Here is a response to a friend and her collective who saw the Green/Siegel film, The Weather Underground, and wrote with some questions....

Hey Elizabeth—

I’m weak at e-mail and would love to come down for a conversation sometime—so much better. Also do you have Fugitive Days? It’s a deeper account than the film. But I’ll give a try at some response to your questions:
1) We started off as anti-war and civil rights activists in the early and middle 1960s’. We were created by those struggles, shaped by a belief that you learn to act by acting, that you must grow and learn from practice rather than any received ideas, and that the optimal place to be—from which to learn the most—is to ally with the most oppressed, Blacks in the South, for example, the victims of America’s wars, and to cast your fate with them. The wisdom on the ground, we thought, will change you. And it did—those early years were when we saw for the fist time the connections between racism at home, war abroad, chauvanism, sexism, environmental degradation, apathy and cynicism, and on and on. Once things were connected, we saw a system at work, we were radicalized, we named that system—imperialism—and forged an idea of how to overthrow it. We were influenced by Marx, but we were formed more closely and precisely by Che, Ho, Malcolm X, Amlilcar Cabral, Mandela—the Third World revolutionaries—and we called ourselves small “c” communists to indicate our rejection of what had become of Marx in the Soviet Block and the other doctrinaire, authoritarian state socialisms. We were anti-authoritarian, anti-orthodoxy, communist street fighters.
3) What we need to do—all of us—is to recognize our huge responsibility to act on what the known demands—to become subjects of history—but also to acknowledge that in a vast and expanding universe, each of us is a finite and flawed being. This should not paralyze us. We must act; we must doubt. In other words, we act in order to teach, and also in order to learn. A firm and unshakable structure of ideas is not a learning agenda, it’s a prison. So the problem—complex, full of anguish—is to open your eyes to the suffering world, to act knowing that you, too, and your group, has blind spots. We act to change things, but also to change ourselves, to grow, to develop, to become more effective, to get beyond some of our blind spots and to encounter others. Those not busy being born are busy dying. And there simply is no recipe or script to follow toward heaven. If there were, we’d already be there. So: act, question, learn, act again.
4) In a world so profoundly out of balance there’s so much to do—I think having a single standard of action is a mistake. Everyone who opposed the war against Viet Nam was on the right side. I want to embrace Diana, yes, but also draft resisters, deserters, tax avoiders, demonstrators, letter writers. Let’s help them all make the necessary links. The more you know, the more you see, the more is demanded of you.
6) The details and dimensions have to be worked out by millions over the life of the struggle. But we have to make a stab at articulating the alternative if only to provide some guidance and standards for our actions in the present. If we know we hope to achieve a democratic and socialist world, a culture of life and love, our strategy and tactics are informed by filling that vision out on the ground, in the real conditions we find. In South Africa, the ANC opposed the hideous practice of “necklacing”, for example, and the NLF in Viet Nam condemned the random killing of civilians as terror worthy of the US.
7) Yes, we built organizational links—Bernardine was the Interorganizational (International) Secretary of SDS. The World Social Forum, Seattle and Genoa, the international movements for human rights, environmental sanity, justice for women, against racism, and more—this is the most hopeful time there ever was for a progressive globalism to oppose neo-liberalism and empire, the globalism of reaction and death and greed.
8) It’s hard, it’s hard, it’s hard… To me the key is just like any important relationship—partners, parents and kids, teachers and students, whatever: be committed to the relationship and to the deep humanity of each person; figure out through practice when to push and when to support; be patient; be generous; aim high; hold on. Forgive each other and still invite the best in each other. Appear before each other as the best you can be. Avoid self-righteousness. Ask the most of yourself… Clearly it’s not a formula, but a practice.
10) It’s so much worse now… It’s breath-taking. And we need to live against those things and embody an alternative.
12) I won’t make any lofty claims for myself, but I’ve been being told to grow up from the time I was ten until this morning. Bullshit. Anyone who salutes your “youthful idealism” is a patronizing reactionary. Resist! Don’t grow up! I went to Camp Casey in August precisely because I’m an agnostic about how and where the rebellion will break out, but I know I want to be there and I know it will break out—we are not living at the end of history, this is not a point of arrival, and another world is possible. But nothing will follow what we already know, so be alive, awake, ready… use your art, your brain, your body to try to resist the dehumanizing in society now, and to live an alternative.
14) Opposing aggressive war is always urgent, but for revolutionaries we need to both be fully activated in the opposition, fully supportive of mass democratic formations, and at the same time trying to make connections and deepen our and others’ analysis: Iraq, Guantanamo, Kyoto, New Orleans, Chavez, SUV’s, the death penalty… It’s part of one thing.
15) Yes, but it’s big. Look to the Interventionist movement in art, Chiapas, the new documentary films and radio, commix, and anything else bubbling from below.
16) People who think they’re “fighting from the inside” are often deluding themselves. Of course, we do live inside the empire, inside a city, inside certain institutions. But the indispensable element is always an independent movement pushing from below, from the margins, from outside. What ended the war? The Movement—we created the peace wing of the democratic party, but not by joining it. What created civil rights law? The Movement, not LBJ. What made the New Deal reforms possible? The Labor Movement, not FDR. Organize.

XXX
Bill

Weather Underground Redux

2006-04-20T15:14:00.000-05:00

The following is a draft of a brief intro to the collected works of the WUO to be published by Seven Stories Press in late 2006......

The Weather Underground, born Phoenix-like from the ashes of a terrible explosion that killed three of our leaders in Greenwich Village, New York on March 6, 1970, stormed fleetingly across the landscape at the tail end of that mythical and iconic age now simply called the Sixties. Originally a militant formation inside Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the catalytic radical student group of its day, the Weather Underground rose, hot and angry, to—in our own terms—smite the war-mongers and strike against the race-haters. We went over the top. By the mid-1970’s the American war in Viet Nam had ended and the organization had effectively flamed out. Individuals made their twisty ways, singly and in small groups, upward and onward as best they could.
A palimsest—a ghostly smudge—remained, however, as a reminder that the phenomenon had once come to life, that it had indeed existed—vital, wild and animated—that there was something more to find and to see beneath the authorized story. The lessons and the legacy of that fugitive, ephemeral moment are, of course, contested—the ever-changing present, as always, unsettles and makes novel demands upon the past. We discover unforseen lenses with which to examine the ashes, we create fresh perspectives with which to rethink the details and make meaning of the larger contexts, the historical flow, the cultural and social surround. Revisiting the Weather Underground requires another look at what was said, and what we did.
* * *
In 1965, just as the American catastrophe in Viet Nam was reaching full ignition, I was arrested along with 38 others for disrupting the normal operations of the Ann Arbor draft board, part of the bureaucratic machinery for sorting soldiers from civilians, the living from the dead—issuing, we concluded, toxic warrants to kill and to die. Earlier in the year, at the first Teach-In, I’d heard Paul Potter, then president of SDS, end a talk on the necessity of protest against the U.S. war in Viet Nam by saying, “Don’t let your life make a mockery of your values.” I signed up on the spot. I wore a small peace button, and one that said “Let the people decide.”
We borrowed energy and tactics from the Civil Rights Movement, of course, and we intended, as well, to awaken our fellow citizens to the magnitude of the moral crisis we found ourselves in. This was a huge civil disobedience, part of the First International Days of Protest Against the Viet Nam War, but it was not exactly “popular.” Only about 15 percent of Americans opposed the war then, and even in progressive Ann Arbor we were pretty much on our own that day, surrounded by thousands of students who supported the war and wanted to see us expelled from school, or worse. So much for the myth of the good old days of popular resistance when everyone knew the right road to follow.
But by early 1968 a majority of citizens had come to oppose the war, and a sitting US president had, in effect, relinquished his office because of it. Several developments in those three short years had dramatically shifted the balance and altered the scene.
For one thing, US political leaders—blind and arrogant as they took over the failed French colonial mission—were certain that they would triumph easily over a poor, peasant nation, and would be welcomed as liberators by the natives—that tired, delusional conceit of every would-be conqueror. But the Vietnamese refused their assigned role in Washington’s script, and the National Liberation Front wouldn’t quit; they retreated when necessary, holed up underground as required, and reemerged suddenly to beat back the invaders. The Vietnamese refused to lose.
Further, those of us who opposed the war set out early to organize and to educate our fellow citizens. We marched and picketed and resisted—it’s true—but we also drew up factsheets, created teach-ins, circulated petitions. The most difficult and exhilarating project for me was Viet Nam Summer, a concerted effort to knock on every door in working class neighborhoods—I was assigned to Detroit—and meet people face to face, listen to their concerns, and engage them in dialogue about war and peace. The more we tried to teach others, the more we ourselves learned—about Viet Nam, about America, about politics and possibility, about ourselves. We became better teachers, deeper, more thoughtful and more effective organizers. We also became radicalized as we made the connections between foreign war and domestic racism, between economic hierarchies and the hollowing out of democracy, and eventually we thought of ourselves as revolutionaries, committed to overturning the whole damned system.
Many in the Civil Rights Movement came out early and unequivocally against the war. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), for example, issued a statement saying that “No Black man should go 10,000 miles away to fight for a so-called freedom he doesn’t enjoy in Mississippi,” and Muhammed Ali said, “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger… I won’t fight in the white man’s army.” Martin Luther King, Jr., with his great prestige and base of liberal support on the line, denounced the war as illegal and immoral, and with some palpable anguish, condemned his own government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”
All of this shook the country to its core, and perhaps the last straw was the large numbers of vets returning from Viet Nam that came out and told the plain, recognizable truth. With the anti-war movement at its height and hundreds of thousands of people demonstrating in the streets, they joined the peace movement in droves, bringing a renewed urgency and purpose, even creating their own anti-war organizations which inspired new levels of militancy in our ranks. The movement, which had been organizing GI’s from the start, embraced the vets as a strategic priority, and many vets found a natural ally in the movement, and discovered that they had more in common with their young activist peers than with the old bastards in power. When they lined up, tore their medals and war decorations from their throats, and threw them down on the Capitol steps, they initiated a new dimensions to the crisis.
So when the president relented, those of us who had worked to end the war felt vindicated and triumphant. In Ann Arbor we swirled out of our apartments and snaked through the streets in a spontaneous victory dance, rallying finally on the steps of the home of the president of the University of Michigan. He greeted us with words of encouragement: “Congratulations,” he said. “You’ve won an important victory. Now the war will end.” I think he believed what he said that night; I know that I did.
Five days later Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated and cities around the country erupted—fire in the streets, martial law, tanks and troops patrolling downtown. Three months later it was Robert Kennedy. Whether conspiracies or isolated events, the serial assassinations had an impact on our sense of possibility. Henry Kissinger emerged with a “secret plan to end the war,” Richard Nixon was elected president, and by the winter it was clear that the war would not end—it would escalate and expand in spite of the wishes of almost everyone.
The war became deadlier and deadlier—each day that it dragged on, 2,000 innocent people were murdered by the United States government. Not every week or every month—every day. Two thousand people. Slaughtered. And there was no end in sight. What to do?
Living through that time, the aggression, the assassinations, the terrorist war raging on and on in our names, it seemed as if we were experiencing terminally cataclysmic events and permanent war. Looking back, of course, we can see that even if it felt that way, it wasn’t so—that while it was monstrous and bloody, the war lasted only a decade, and then it was done. Three million people were needlessly killed. But in those days, with the outcome far from certain, we had to choose our actions within a shifting, complex, and speculative world. Should I oppose the war? On what basis? How far should I go in order to prevent more senseless slaughter and dismemberment? Could I be part of mobilizing a more wide-spread resistance? Could we perhaps go beyond ending this war, and end the system that led so inevitably to war after war? Could we have an impact?
Some of us burned out. Others fled to Europe or Canada or Africa. Some ran for office, while others ran for the communes of California or Vermont. Some dug in. Others dropped out. Some created what they thought would become “vanguard” revolutionary political parties and went into the factories to organize the industrial working class, while others joined the Democratic Party with the hope of building a powerful peace wing within it. Some made a religion out of making love, others made a mess of making revolution. No choice was the obvious best choice, none in retrospect was up to the challenge. We in the Weather Underground blasted away at the rulers, and tried at the same time to build up a capacity to undermine and survive what we were certain was an incipient and impending American fascism. With the townhouse explosion, with the deaths of our friends and lovers, we disappeared.
* * *
We issued our first communiqué—a word we borrowed from Latin American guerrillas—called a “Declaration of War” and signed by “Bernardine Dohrn”, in May 1970. It was filled with defiance and hyperbole. We threatened to bomb “a major symbol of American injustice,” and when, a little more than two weeks later the promised explosion rocked the New York City Police Headquarters on Centre Street, the Weathermyth was fully launched. The communiqué was reprinted widely and, oddly enough, through it we instructed the FBI—and through them police forces everywhere—on our reliability and our quirky authenticating signs. We were in communication.
There was a practice then of public storytelling, and the subtext was our own hopeful message: you can’t catch us.
We opened to a world of words and they tumbled from us in a crazy flash flood of awakening zeal. We wrote open letters to the militant Catholic left—and they wrote back urging us to temper our actions with compassion—and to the Black Liberation Army, who urged us to blast away at colonializing racist power everywhere, no holds barred. We argued with both, and we agreed with both.
We scribbled to old friends—roommates from an earlier world, favorite teachers, brothers and sisters. I wrote to John Holt, an inspiring teacher and education writer, a deeply conservative man in some ways but a loving friend as well, and we linked up and corresponded for years. I communicated with my Aunt Sarah, a closeted leftie, and most of us (but not me) wrote to our parents—careful missives meant to reassure, delivered discreetly and then quickly destroyed. We were ill-equipped gunslingers, and we became word-slingers instead.
* * *
We were, of course, like everybody else, a bunch of signifying monkeys, more monkeyish than some, but of a type, hanging tentatively suspended in our interpretive jungle, sending shared meanings spinning along the dense thicket of language. We invented words; we constructed culture. And we were, like others, forever explaining, defining, correcting, implying, editing, translating in sometimes delighted, often desperate efforts to be understood.
The Weatherpeople were all talkers—we already loved words and we read widely; groups of us were regular Scrabble players and Sunday crossword puzzle workers. The garble of Weatherese was mostly an intellectual game—clever and distracting—but learning how to evade arrest had a serious purpose, a purpose that rode along on words, on our talk tactics, mostly. When my car broke down on a highway, the cop who pulled over found me not only respectful and engaging but open and grateful for his presence. I was practicing verbal jujitsu. Soon he offered to give me a push to the nearest service station, and I asked for his name so that I might send a letter of gratitude to his commanding officer. (He refused—the helpful push was outside regulations.) Again and again we learned what you say and how you say it had more to do with survival than anything else.
The preface “Weather” had become as prominent among us as “Mc” is in the wider world, and just as colonizing. We talked of Weathermen and Weatherwomen, Weatherkids and Weatherstories, Weather documents and Weathersymps. The leadership was, of course, the Weather Bureau, a leaflet was a Weather Balloon, and the anti-imperialist struggle was the Weather Going Tide. Recruits went through what amounted to an informal Weatherman Berlitz in order to become functionally bilingual.
When we began doing secret and illegal work we needed a word that cloaked our intentions, and so we spoke of the North Star, and then of the Dash—I’m spending this morning on the Dash, someone might say, implying both a censor’s beep, a word unspoken, as well as the mad dash we anticipated to the underground railroad, following the North Star toward freedom. When we were actually on the run we inoculated ourselves from fear and called our fugitiveness “the Joke”—Have you told your new boyfriend the Joke? Or: I don’t think anyone here knows the Joke. Our organization, publicly the Weather Underground, became the Eggplant, from an obscure rock lyric about “the eggplant that ate Chicago.”
We expropriated an entire lexicon of Weather words from the music—“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” of course, from Bob Dylan, “Bad Moon,” our code word for the Haymarket statue, from Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Rescue” from Fontella Bass’s “Rescue Me” was the name for a two-year effort, finally successful, to break a Black Liberation Army comrade from jail. We drew on “Kick Out the Jams” by the MC5 for names and codes, “Purple Haze” in tribute to Jimi Hendrix, and “Volunteers” from the Jefferson Airplane. The Pentagon was called “Maggie’s Farm,” again from Dylan, because, we said simply, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.”
Homegrown, as American as cherry pie, the underground was in other ways a foreign country—we spoke patois and did things differently there.
* * *
Our survival had to have meaning beyond the narrow and the particular. For me, and for most of us, we searched for meaning by participating fully in all aspects of life, and we would try to understand everything in order to make ourselves subjects in history and not passive objects to be used and discarded. We would make history, act within it in order to enlarge people and contribute to humanity. We would fight unearned suffering and undeserved pain, all the ways people oppress and exploit and dehumanize one another. We would affirm every gesture toward social justice and liberty, everything that honored each human being as irreplaceably worthwhile and the whole of humanity sacred. And—with some luck—we would participate in an upheaval that would destroy the death machine and allow human beings to reach the full measure of their humanity. Revolution!
We hoped that our actions would speak for themselves. Our efforts would be stained by mistakes, of course, because we could never see fully or far enough, we could never know all things in all ways. We were limited as is everyone, our theories flawed. Still, I believed the greater crime would be to do nothing, or not enough. Inaction was impossible. Stepping into history, we would make errors; staying aloof from history would be its own choice and error. And so, believing in the immense power of people to challenge fate and accomplish the unthinkable, holding on to a profound sense of personal responsibility, I plunged ahead. We would fight, but in new ways. We would bring the war home as we had planned, but with measured force, with precision. We would draw an angry sword against white supremacy, retaliate for racist attacks, and fight alongside our Black revolutionary comrades, but from a new and liberated space. And with care.
Within months we had established a pattern of action—retaliation for what we believed were attacks on the Black struggle, and offensives against the war machine. Our signature was a warning call to some sleepy guard inside the building or to the police nearby or to a journalist with calm and detailed instructions to clear a specific area, and then letters of explanation—sometimes exhorting, sometimes threatening, sometimes still barely decipherable beyond the knowing—claiming credit and publicly defending our actions as politics by other means, signed and delivered simultaneously to several major newspapers in different cities across the country seconds after the blast. The FBI and the big city police knew our signature, and separated what they came to know as the authentic Weather nuts from the variously weird.
Each letter had a logo hand-drawn across the page—our trademark thick and colorful rainbow with a slash of angry lightning cutting through it. New morning, it signified, changing weather. Oddly, as intense as it all looks and sounds, it was in our minds then cautious and responsible, a huge de-escalation from the apocalyptic plans of just months earlier. In any case, I loved that symbol of peace and reconciliation balanced by the hot bolt of justice.
* * *
This was a time when I, along with most of my closest friends, were referred to again and again as “home-grown American terrorists.” That’s what Time magazine called us in 1970, and the New York Times, too, and that was the word hurled in my direction from the halls of Congress. Terrorist. I’d been a national officer of Students for a Democratic Society, and then a founder of the Weather Underground, and I was indicted with many comrades by the Justice Department in 1970 on two single-count conspiracies—one for crossing state lines in order to create a civil disturbance, the other for crossing state lines to destroy government property. I had no intention of answering in federal court—I’d seen by then too many activists entangled in lengthy trials and, no matter what the verdict, neutralized and effectively kept off the streets—and so I took off and lived on the run for the next decade. I thought of myself immodestly as a freedom fighter, but I knew that “terrorist” was tattooed over every inch of me—it was an electrifying label, even then. I imagined a pale figure dressed in an oily overcoat, feverish, eyes blazing, beard and hair wild and unkempt, sitting in the back of a theater with a black bomb in his pocket. Nothing at all like me. No, I said to myself at the time, I’m no terrorist.
When I turned myself in over a decade later, federal charges against me and the rest of us had all been dropped because of “extreme government misconduct,” and I was, so to speak, free. I picked up where I’d left off, took up open political work, returned to graduate school and to teaching, and the label—terrorist—faded into the gauzy haze of memory. But not, it turns out, forever. I’ve partly myself to blame. Moved to remember and to rethink it all, I wrote a memoir called Fugitive Days about the wretched years of the American war in Viet Nam, the dark decade of serial assassinations of Black leaders, the exhilarating upheaval and the sparkling fight for freedom and peace and justice and revolution as I’d experienced it.
It was an odd thing—and sometimes frightening, too—to write about events and people and experiences buried now in the deep, deep past. Those days became suddenly alive—closer than they’d been in decades—and I couldn’t help but feel partly responsible for prying open the crypt and inviting those newly vitalized ghosts to dance at the reunion. As I wrote, the past began to surface all around me. What lessons might it bring? What promises and what warnings?
I knew, of course, that some of the ghosts would not be happy: the Righteous Right led by David Horowitz, born-again prophet of apostasy and self-proclaimed expert on radicalism, could be counted on to read my words as Jeremiad from the worst of the Looney-Tune Left and to fulminate and to fume, and the scholars of “sixties history”—mostly liberal academics and commentators now, members of what seems sometimes like a suffocating corporate structure, the Sixties/New Left, Inc., with Todd Gitlin, former president of SDS and now a professor at Columbia University, as Chairman of the Board—would protect their patents and their own self-authorized books by firing away at mine, performing some sort of self-dramatized conversion, trimming their sails.
I knew, of course, that there were several deeply disturbing aspects to our history, foremost the question of violence, for in 1970 the Weather Underground was literally born from the flames of that Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, a bombing in which my lover and two close friends blew themselves to kingdom come. We who survived went on to carry out a few highly visible anti-government bombings—acts that raise questions each generation will ask and answer differently. While the U.S. was killing two thousand people a day, planting a bomb in a pipe in the Pentagon was our high-pitched wail against the war’s sickness—part scream, part lamentation, part warning. The act was designed as a symbol, and as intended, neither killed nor even hurt a single person. Still, what if someone had been killed? We crossed crucial lines, and troubling questions echoed around us and pushed into our space.

Yet the Weather Underground’s symbolic acts were meant as the strongest possible protest against the Empire’s lethal acts of sustained and premeditated mass slaughter. Consider the U.S. atrocity committed at My Lai. In a matter of hours, U.S. soldiers raped, looted, maimed, and tortured the residents of a village; they burned homes, slaughtered animals; and killed 347 villagers. The My Lai massacre embodied the unvarnished horror of the Pentagon’s murderous frenzy in Southeast Asia. Likewise, Weather’s actions embodied the intensity of the resistance—during the early 1970’s over 20,000 government targets inside the U.S. were bombed, and the Weather Underground took responsibility for about a dozen.
#

Questionnaire:

1. What is terrorism?

2. Is the concept—terrorism—consistent and universal, does it apply to all parties engaged in certain actions, or does it change over time?

3. Which terrorist had a 100,000 British pound reward on his head in the 1930’s?

4. When did he become a “freedom fighter”, his image rehabilitated?

5. How many Israeli Prime Ministers were designated “terrorist” by the British government at some point in their political careers?

6. Which group of foreign visitors to the White House in 1985 were hailed by Ronald Reagan as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers, “freedom fighters” against the “Evil Empire”?

7. What did George W. Bush call these same men?

8. Who offered the following definitions? “Terrorism is a modern barbarism that we call terrorism;”; “Terrorism is a threat to Western civilization;” “Terrorism is a menace to Western moral values;”“[W]e have no trouble telling [terrorists from freedom fighters]”; “Terrorism is a form of political violence.”

9. Which US president said, “I am a contra”, referring to the Nicaraguan group designated “terrorist” by international human rights observers?

10. Has there ever been a US president who refused to employ “political violence”?

11. Which form of terrorism—religious, criminal, political, or official and state sanctioned—has caused the most death and destruction in the past five hundred years? One hundred years? Ten years? Which has caused the least?

* * *
When Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were murdered in 1969 in a West Side apartment in Chicago, some of us thought we were witnessing the Gestapo-tactics of a burgeoning police state up-close and in vivid color—the certain and clear face of terror. Fred was the charismatic young leader of the Black Panther Party, and since our offices were just blocks apart on Madison Avenue, we saw each other every day, and he was our friend.
We’d been subject to escalating police harassment ourselves—our apartments regularly ransacked, our cars vandalized, and in a growing number of raids we were systematically beaten. It was all bad and we felt besieged, but we knew that the worst was reserved for our Black brothers and sisters—twenty seven Panthers had been shot down by police forces from L.A. to New York in the past year alone, and we saw nothing ahead to slow the pace. And now Fred was dead.
I’d already encountered the political/criminal terror of the cross-burners and the mobilized mobs of hateful white supremists, but when Fred was killed—I saw all the machinery of not just State-sanctioned violence but of State-sanctioned justification kick into high gear. Sober assessments by the police and the State’s Attorney ran in the papers—the Panthers are a violent gang, they said, authors of random acts of lawlessness that terrorize ordinary citizens; the Panthers brought this tragedy upon themselves by initiating a shoot-out; the police were merely defending themselves. The truth: the police assault was sustained and overwhelming and unanswered; Fred had been slipped a drug by a police infiltrator and was unconscious in his bed when he was killed. Fred was called a violent terrorist, but he was in fact the victim—the forces that killed him were a small part of a vast and wealthy system, armed to the teeth, of official terror.
All these years later I tremble at Fred’s murder, as I trembled then. I trembled with rage, it’s true, and fear. I trembled with uncertainty: What could we do to survive? How could we help the remaining Panthers? How would the movement move forward?
#
INTERROGATION
Do you believe in violence?
“Believe” is an odd word here. I see violence everywhere and I detest it, but I don’t think we should discuss this as a religion. Violence isn’t a faith but a fact…
What do you mean, a fact?
I mean that violence is a terrible reality, that the remnants of displaced violence are everywhere apparent and unavoidable if we would just open our eyes.
You saw the video of the recent protests?
The burning cars, the young people throwing rocks and bottles, the shock troops of empire…
“Shock troops of empire”?
So they looked to me—the high-tech helmets, the shields, the uniform anonymity…
And what about the rioters, weren’t they dressed alike, and also as shock troops?
There’s a difference…
The difference, of course, is that they can’t achieve their goals legally and so they turn to violence, destroying anything in their path, provoke the police and the army to respond, isn’t that the difference?
I suppose it depends on where you start the tape…
Start the tape?
Exactly. It depends entirely on where you choose to begin. The countries you’re inclined to defend turn to violence systematically, routinely. They are typically born in violence, and surely sustained by violence. Some would say the cycle of violence begins there.
So you side with the rioters?
At least we should understand them…
And here, as elsewhere, you justify violence?
No, not at all. But I can understand it without justifying it. Violence terrifies me. I admire the teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr., his words always in sharp, gentle, fearless, tough. What King did so brilliantly was to expose the hidden violence that had always been there—the violence of racism, of rights denied. He led a movement that disregarded the official disregard of people’s rights—he negated a negation—and what surfaced all around him was violence—the barbarity of the police, the threats of the mobs, the ongoing brutality of the racist terrorists. He exposed a system of violence, and he was left exposed himself, and he was murdered. The White House, fearing that other Black leaders would “exploit the anger in the ghetto” said, “Nothing is achieved by violence,” and the National Guard was summoned.
And isn’t that true? What is achieved by violence?
Institutionalized violence, the violence of slavery, lynching, segregation, prisons, for example, in our own or any other country—this is the normalized violence that the powerful employ to achieve their privileges. Whole generations might grow up, get old and die, and never lift a hand against one another, and yet the relationship, adequately examined and understood—yes, observed from the start—was violent at its very core. When slaves did rise up against masters—Harriet Tubman, say, or Nat Turner—they were met with incomprehension and rage, called violent terrorists and slaughtered. Colonialism is another such relationship.
During U.S.-lead wars like Viet Nam and Iraq every American is implicated in acts of violence—we know what was being done in our names, we see and read about instances of the terror in gory detail, and we have the opportunity to remain morally silent or to resist. Many remain silent, and others resist. Some take extreme measures.
So you do believe in violence?
* * *
Sooner or later everything in America becomes commodified or disappears. Just so “THE SIXTIES,” something I didn’t even know existed as I lived through it. No one experiences the flow of life in neatly defined chunks, certainly not in decades—oh my gosh, it’s January 1, 1970, I’d better change my clothes—everyone is an intergenerational person, but the imagined Sixties are a bounded myth, constantly being retold, constantly being repackaged and resold as a containable cultural unit. The pitch-men are a shock: Janis Joplin’s image employed to sell Mercedes-Benz, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda on choppers hyping Diners Club for when you’re on the road, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Jr. himself. Imagine.
The war was a national disaster, it’s true, and the current received wisdom is like a stuttering script of repeating slogans—often contradictory but always untroubled. These are some of the sacred articles we are all supposed to know by now: Viet Nam was a quagmire sucking the US down, the well-intentioned and innocent first steps transformed in the Asian jungles into something unspeakable, but not our fault, never our fault; the war was bad or wrong or a mistake, the media heroically and consistently truth-telling throughout, and right-thinking people opposed the war, responsible protesters now part of our proud democratic tradition; the vets suffered most, both in the field and a second time when, on returning home, they were shunned or even spit upon. Like most clichés and myths, these fail to heal, fail even to inform. Each has a thread of truth to hang itself on, while each dissolves complexity and destroys the contextual content. Their tenaciousness is more a function of their seemingly endless repetitions—the Big Lie-style refrain chanted at every turn—on how they allow us to cling to our child-like view of the world. They mostly wilt and die under scrutiny.
Take this last cliché—the vets were reviled at home. When Richard Nixon began his run for the presidency, he based his campaign on a falsehood: the vaunted “secret plan” to end the war. A corollary to this grand disingenuous gesture was another—to stick up for the GI’s, not against the war-makers, the brass, or the rotten politicians who perpetuated the deepening agony for their own puny careers, but, amazingly, against the peace movement itself. And so we discover that returning vets were spit upon by long-hairs, and that cynical image was blown into an icon beyond truth—beyond truth because it is not true.
The Black freedom struggle too, has been in part rendered toothless in the retelling. What many of us experienced as part of a continuum—what Russel Banks in Cloudsplitter called “beads on a string… bubbles of blood on a barbed steel strand that stretches from the day the first enslaved African was brought ashore in Virginia to today, and we have not reached the end of it yet”—is recast to accommodate an uncomplicated conclusion. Martin Luther King, Jr. is recast as a saint with a dream rather than an angry pilgrim and radical activist, and Malcolm X as a memoirist with a bit of a chip on his shoulder rather than an evolving, growing revolutionary. The received truth of history, then, becomes the common sense of the culture—and as everyone knows, there is simply nothing more insistent nor dogmatic than common sense.
People now in their fifties or sixties risk settling for a gutted version of the past—we all opposed the war, we now say, we all fought for civil rights. Actually, the corporate media were sycophantic from the beginning, then, like now, stenographers to power, often irrelevant, mocking and diversionary with occasional luminous points of brilliance. Walter Conkrite called the corrupt and brutal General Ky “the George Washington of Viet Nam” in a smarmy and deferential interview at the start of the war, and the New York Times was still seeing the famous “light at the end of the tunnel” just before the Tet Offensive of 1968. Everyone rehabilitated eventually, and then erased the tapes in favor of a more convenient record.
The US government, though, learned some serious lessons from those times, lessons they’ve implemented ferociously ever since. It abolished the citizen army, for example, almost immediately—a citizen army has the great disadvantage of being filled with citizens, people who are likely at any time to think for themselves and then to speak up spontaneously, people who don’t easily become obedient and willing killers. It also banned the media from any further first-hand encounter with military action—reporters on the ground, too, are unruly and, even in the service of a group of servile media mandarins, likely to report too much the felt experience of war, deviating from the high-sounding mythology and abstratction, and they might say anything then, even the truth. No more free-thinking Gloria Emersons or Michael Herrs. No more Tim O’Briens. No more witnesses. At least they hoped.
* * *
The problems today are huge, as always, and our ability to respond puny by comparison. But respond we will, respond we must. We may claim to be apolitical, to be unaware, but the world keeps turning, keeps charging forward. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau said: You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.
Rousseau argues in regard to justice, equality “must not be understood to mean that degrees of power and wealth should be exactly the same,” but only that with respect to power, equality renders it “incapable of all violence” and only exerted in the interest of a freely developed and participatory law, and that with respect to wealth, “no citizen should be so opulent that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained to sell himself.” The quest for social justice over many centuries can be thought of as working within the open spaces of that ideal.
For every human being’s life is, in part, an experience of pain and loss—there is always a tragic dimension to our brief time within the light. But our living experience also embraces other inescapable facts: we are all in this together, all passengers and crew on the same global spaceship, and too much (but not all) of what we suffer in life is the evil we visit upon one another; that is, it is unjustified suffering, unnatural loss, unnecessary pain—the kinds of things that ought to be avoidable, that we might even imagine eliminating altogether.
If society cannot be changed under any circumstances, if there is nothing that can be done, not even small and humble gestures toward something better, well, that about ends the conversation. Our sense of agency shrinks, our choices diminish, and our obligation to our fellow human beings ends. What more would there be to say? It would be sufficient then to simply wander weeping in the streets or to retreat into hedonism, concluding that human life is nothing more than a brutish, vicious, swamp-war, that our predatory and destructive sides must triumph, and that if I am to be spared, many, many others will have to be sacrificed, and I will agree to look on with indifference, or with at most a nod toward compassion.
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QUESTIONNAIRE FOR AN ANGUISHED CONVERSATION
1. Name the countries bordering Afghanistan? Iraq?

2. Which country shares the shortest border?

3. Which the longest?

4. Where, when, and under what circumstances did Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’ associate, sustain his shoulder wound?

5. How many Afghans were involved in the September 11 attacks? How many Iraqis?

6. What percentage of the world’s people live in the United States? In Asia?

7. What percentage of the world’s finished products are consumed by people in the U.S.?

8. What percentage of the world’s energy resources are consumed in the US?

9. How large are the undeveloped oil reserves in Afghanistan? In Central Asia? In Iraq?

10. Of the world’s six billion people, how many lack the basics to survive? How many own a computer? How many have a bank account?

11. If the world were a village of 100 people, how many would be:
a) literate?
b) Muslims, Christians, Jews?
c) hungry?
d) homeless?

* * *
It’s impossible to reach the age of sixty—if your eyes are open even a crack—and not feel some regret for something. I regret much—once again I resonate with the generative genius of Bob Dylan singing of “so many things we never will undo; I know you’re sorry, well I’m sorry too.” But, he goes on, “stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow, things are going to get interesting right about now.” Still I’m disinclined to apologize because I hear the demand for a general apology as a howling mob with an impossibly broad demand, and on top of that I’m not sure what exactly I’d apologize for. The ’68 Convention? The Days of Rage? Bombing the Pentagon? Every one of these can be unpacked and found to be a complicated mix of good and bad choices, noble and low motives.
In some part, apologizing is rejecting, letting go or giving up—conversion. There’s something deeply human at stake, something in both the heart and the head, an intellectual severance, an emotional break. And a broad, general apology may be just too much—I am not now nor have I ever been… Even when true, the words are mortifying. They are the end not only of a dream, but of a life. The apology in general is uttered, and suddenly you die.
On top of that, the apology is never enough—to be effective it must be enacted every day, its sincerity proved by ongoing symbolic purges, no one of which is ever adequate. David Horowitz, the poster-boy of 60’s recantation, said that if Bernardine and I were to say we’re sorry for everything and then don sackcloth and ashes it wouldn’t be adequate. There’s always more to do.
Naming names during the McCarthy years was the prescribed form of apology for a radical youth. People were coerced into providing information when no information was needed—the rift was long past, the names already known—and to disassociate with a ghost already gone. The ritual was one of expiation, isolation, and realignment. Loyalty and subservience was the rite of passage, the price of growing up.
In my case, my actions are all well-known, I’ve resolved the legal charges, and I’ve faced the consequences. Yet a central moral question remains—the question of individual responsibility and of the nature of judgment. But I still refuse to grow up if the price is to falsely confess a sin I don’t take to be a sin. What is left to do? Those who refused and suffered the lash of McCarthyism, those who “stood on principle,” had a terrible time trying to articulate what the principle was: Support for the U.S. Communist Party? Not exactly. For Stalinism? No, definitely not. Opposition to anything the U.S. government does? The importance of never telling on friends? Free speech? I feel the same bind. What am I defending?
Perhaps it’s simply the importance of defying the ritual abasement and the rewriting of history. I embrace that defiance. Where in all the noise is there any authentic call for a process of truth-telling, a means to reconciliation? Where might we construct an honest chain of culpability?
America is in desperate need to some kind of truth and reconciliation process—not because I want to see Henry Kissinger, for example, wheeled out in front of a magistrate and forced to confront his victims. Well…it’s tempting, but not the heart of the matter. We need a process to understand the truth of the past in order to create the possibility for a more just future. We need a history lesson as a guide to teaching. It’s really that simple.
I feel most regret for the intense sectarianism and then splitism that I participated in. The dogmatism, the prison of a strict set of rigid ideas, the isolation—I regret it all. I don’t regret escalating the fight against racism, white supremacy, and U.S. imperialism—still the biggest threat to a world at peace and in balance. I’m sorry we weren’t as effective as we might have been, and sorry we didn’t do more to stop the murder.
The victims of violations must have the opportunity to tell their stories of suffering; the victimizers must be asked why and how they created that suffering; society must have the opportunity of witnessing all of this in order to understand the extent and depth of the disaster as a step toward putting it behind us. So we need the stories that constitute the truth-telling, and we need the possibility of amnesty in order to move on.
In this truth-telling you can make no convincing moral distinction among victims—suffering is suffering after all. But distinctions are possible, even necessary, among perpetrators: anti-colonial fighters, for example, are struggling for justice against forces of oppression.
Similarly collective guilt and collective punishment are terrible, reactionary ideas whether in the hands of European Nazis or French colonialists or Israeli settlers. On the other hand, collective responsibility is an essential and powerful and useful concept. Americans are, as a group, responsible for the suffering caused by our wars. We must, as individuals and as a group, do something about it.
So I want to keep it complicated, to defend complexity against the distorting labels that come to us in neat packages and summary forms—apologizing in general is asking too much. As one McCarthy-era resister said: I’d rather be a red to the rats, than a rat to the reds.
* * *
If we are convinced that all history is past, that we are not living inside history and that all the “historic moments” happened before we got here—and, incidentally, had any of us been around for one of them—abolition, say, women’s suffrage, or the fight for the eight-hour day—we’re equally convinced that not only would we have been on the side of the angels, but that we’d have been gutsy and agitating heroes—we not only have a distorted view of history, but, more important, we are blind to the present. We are made to think that this moment is somehow a point of arrival, the only possible outcome, and we are rendered powerless then to imagine another world, or to act on behalf of what could be, but is not yet. Here’s an example:
From 1882-1968 white terrorist mobs lynched close to 5,000 African-American men in the United States. Anti-lynching legislation was introduced into Congress hundreds of times during these years, and on those occasions when a bill passed the House, it was always killed in the Senate. Most white people—even those who opposed the lawlessness—tacitly accepted this situation in part because they bought the general demonization of African-Americans and in part because they had developed a “fixed notion,” abstracted from context and complexity, assuming that the Black people who got lynched were likely guilty.
It’s true that some whites campaigned against it, and that’s a hopeful part of the story, but it’s also true that white opponents were a teeny group—almost no white people took any overt action against lynching whatsoever.
Fast forward to June 13, 2005 when the U.S. Senate passed by voice vote a non-binding resolution expressing “the deepest sympathies and solemn regrets…to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States.” On that day “the Senate remembers the history of lynching to ensure that these tragedies will be neither forgotten nor repeated.” And the action comes in the context of a string of convictions—Byron de la Beckwith, Bobby Frank Cherry, Edgar Ray Killen—for previously unresolved terrorist murders from the civil rights era.
Who can object? On the other hand, what does any of it mean? Is it legitimate atonement for white supremist violence? Or is it superficial and cosmetic and self-congratulatory?
This is tricky. It’s a good thing to note the wrongs of the past certainly, a better thing to identify them correctly and to right those wrongs, to work to repair those wounds. But failing to examine the deeper issues—in this case white supremacy, mechanisms of social control of an entire population, and racial disparity and brutality—and then using that exercise to illuminate today’s injustices, makes the whole thing an empty gesture. Of course the era of lynchings per se should never be repeated, but are there any historical continuities in which we can locate racist oppression and violence today, as in, for example, what’s called the “prison-industrial-complex”? What are we doing about that?
We say of the Holocaust in Europe, “Never Again!” But if “Never Again!” means never allow a German man with a swastika and a moustache named Hitler to rise to power, it’s a silly and a hollow slogan. “Never Again!” must mean more: wide-awakeness, for example, to mass murder, crimes against humanity, and genocide—in Guatemala or Sudan, Cambodia or Rwanda, Palestine or Bosnia or Darfur—and a willingness to act to stop them; or recognition of the toxic combination of social factors—the glorification of military might, for example, disdain for human rights, the drumbeat of nationalism, a compliant media, the demonization of an enemy, fraudulent elections, the manipulation of religion to serve the state, the interlocking of corporate and government interests—that can lead to a catastrophic and murderous outcome.
Today in the United States. 2.1 million of our fellow citizens are in prison. This is 25 percent of the world’s imprisoned population, and it costs us $50 billion a year. And while African-American men make up about 6 percent of the citizenry, they constitute about half of the nation’s prison inmates. And here’s a parallel: if you made a map of lynchings perpetrated in the first quarter of the twentieth century, county by county, and overlaid that with a map of executions carried out in the last quarter of the twentieth century, you’d have an almost identical match. And here’s another: 1/8 of African-American males are disenfranchised for life because of their encounters with the criminal justice system.
Since we are living in the whirlwind of history, since we are all works-in-progress, and since no one knows with certainty what lies ahead, should we raise our voices in protest? Should we cry out? Should we agitate and organize? If not, why not? If so, how?
* * *
The New Yorker ran a block of cartoons after 9/11 under the heading “Americans See the World Anew”—in one a person says, “I just don’t see how they can spell Al Qaeda without a U,” and in another someone gaily tells a friend, “I just love the sound of it—Jalalabad, Jalalabad.” Seeing the world “anew” never transcends this child-like view of ourselves and others. The suffocating sameness of the official talking heads can feel crushing, the unwillingness to use this moment to question basic assumptions crazy.
The civil-rhetorical patriotism evident everywhere—the flags and signs proliferating, the elaborate story and the stock slogans, the giving of blood and the trips to “Ground Zero”—allows, perhaps, a shared grief and a shared incredulity at the start. Given the narrow American palette reaching for the flag might have meant sympathy and unity at the start. But from the start powerful forces were busy using the moment to promote a narrow, repressive patriotism—dissent is unpatriotic, un-American—in the service of horrifying goals and purposes.
Readers Digest featured a cover story a few months later called “Ten Breakthroughs That Can Stop Terrorism”—none had to do with the U.S. posture in the world or even how we might rethink U.S. policy. None looked to the political or the philosophical or the ethical. Rather each was narrow and technical: “Passive Millimeter Wave Camera,” “DNA Chips,” “Truck Transponder,” “Sandia Decon Foam,” and on and on. If that makes you feel safer, what are you smoking?
Time magazine’s 2001 end-of-year issue—with New York Mayor Rudy Giulliani as “Person of the Year”—featured a glowing account of US military might that begins: “One does not normally expect a Republican American President to confirm the wisdom of a Chinese communist, but if ever proof were needed of Mao Zedong’s maxim that ‘political power grows out of the barrel of a gun,’ the war if Afghanistan waged by George W. Bush’s Administration has just supplied it.” A back page essay crows that the world has come around since September 11—that while other countries may not love the US post-Afghanistan, who cares? They have gained, instead, a “deep fear and newfound respect,” and that’s all that’s really needed. When the A-list of world leaders from 106 countries—the business elite, establishment academics, politicians and presidents and princes who attend the World Economic Forum—gathered in New York and, while singing capitalism’s praises, nonetheless slammed US arrogance and self-centeredness, harshly criticized unilateralism and reliance on violence, questioned the pervasive ignorance of environmental degradation and more, American commentators yawned. Who cares?
A National Geographic survey recently found that young Americans—18-25 years-old—could not identify from a blank world map Israel/Palestine (80%), Iraq (80%), Great Britain (50%), or even the US (12%). We are only 4.9% of the global population, but we know neither who we are nor where we are in the world. We are in some profound sense adrift.
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What is to be done? The answers change every day, and yet they remain in some principled way the same. We name the obstacles to our own freedom, to our humanity. We unite with others. We fight against the obstacles. U.S. war and expansion in Iraq, for example, or Israel’s insistence on its right to slowly annihilate the Palestinian people, or the caging and disenfranchisement of Black men. Or U.S. use of indefinite detention, “rendition,” torture, and extrajudicial killings since 9/11. In a world of so much injustice, it’s not hard to find a place to begin, something important to do.
Where do we find hope? We find it in the unparalleled growth of opposition to war and neoliberalism worldwide, in the stirrings from below for participatory democracy and justice. I’m hopeful because the future is unknown and unknowable. We are alive—lucky us—in the swirl of history. We are—each of us—works-in-progress; what we do or fail to do makes a difference; nothing is inevitable. We can do something—lots of things—and it all adds up.
What is my advice to activists? Be smarter. Seek the truth. Be stronger. Find your courage. Have real sharp political debate, but hold on to the treasure of unity. Resist dogma, sloganeering, posing, posturing, boasting, and pride. Don’t elevate tactics above principle. Keep your own counsel. Trust yourselves. Seek balance. Love each other. Breathe in, breathe out. Write it up, write it down. Avoid hierarchy. Be generous. Learn from ordinary people. Align with the most oppressed. Learn from experience. Talk to everyone you meet, and listen to what they have to say for themselves. Read, read, read. Think of your ideas as hypotheses, contingent things to work out in practice. Avoid all received wisdom. Resist ideology—any tight framework of settled ideas. Don’t talk in clichés. Be with the despised. Unite with the outcast. Act and then doubt. And then act. And so on.
* * *
Toward the end of the summer of 2005, outside President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, I joined the encampment known as Camp Casey. Crawford is a town divided: the brightly decorated Peace House faces banners reading, “All the way Mr. President” and “Smoke ‘Em Out, 43”; one side of the road has lawn signs with the iconic image of Marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima and the slogan “Support Our Troops,”—somewhat desperate, I thought, to have to reach so far back for a picture of putative pride in war—the other side answers “Bring Them Home.”
Started by a lone mother, Cindy Sheehan, who vowed to stay for the six weeks of Bush’s vacation in order to ask him a simple question, “Why did my son Casey die in Iraq?”, Camp Casey had become two large encampments by the time I arrived: Camp Casey I, a collection of pup tents lining a ditch outside the ranch, bracketed by crosses bearing the names of American soldiers killed in Iraq, and Camp Casey II, an acre of land nearby donated by a Bush neighbor with a vast tent that looked like something from Cirque de Soleil. The tent was festooned with posters and banners: ANYTHING WAR CAN DO PEACE CAN DO BETTER; WHAT WOULD JESUS BOMB?; JOIN US! It was organized like a tight ship—these were military families after all in the lead—a table of sun screen and caps, a computer and cell phone center, water stations, a sign-up space to volunteer to work. Lunch was served at noon exactly. But it was also abuzz with a thousand projects: visitors were given orientation briefings and assigned a work detail, artists were making murals and wood cuts, the kitchen crew was preparing the next meal for hundreds of protestors. A large circle of young people perched on folding chairs and engaged in intense and animated conversation. These were veterans of the U.S. war against Iraq, women and men, Black and white and Latino and Asian and Native, able-bodied and in wheelchairs. How do we tell the world about this war? they asked. How do we get the truth out? How can we prevent more innocent Iraqis from being killed? How can we prevent more people being sent to suffer and die? How can we build a truly democratic society and create the conditions to stop future wars now? I checked to see if I still had my SDS membership card in my wallet, and there it was, faded but with the old adage printed on the back as true for me today as ever: “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort… looking uneasily at the world we inherit.”
Cindy Sheehan herself was gritty and authentic—engaged in the task at hand, entirely without entourage or acolytes, “body guards” or “mouth pieces.” When a vet posed for a picture with her and said, “My mom’s not gonna believe this—me and Cindy Sheehan!” she smiled and replied, “Before I was a minor celebrity, I was simply Cindy, you know. And I still am.”
Casey Sheehan was born May 29, 1979 and was killed in an ambush during his first week in Iraq, on April 4, 2004. His Mom wants the president to answer truthfully about why he died. The eloquence of the protest is its straight-forward simplicity. And simplicity ruled Camp Casey. A large sign read: “We will act in a way that reflects the world we want to create… We will act with respect toward the local community, encouraging all to join us.” Under the tent there are no outsiders and we are all equal—every human being fully present, fully recognized. Under the tent we can laugh more, dance more, love one another more, and fight the power more. Under the tent is the sensible and the ethical and the soulful place to be. Eventually, I believe, almost everyone will join us under the tent. Sooner, I hope, than later.

The Emerald City: What Beginning Teachers Need To Know

2006-03-29T16:08:00.000-06:00

Introduction: Here's a piece I wrote in June, 2005 for an Introduction to Teaching course I was co-teaching.

I’m writing this on a beautiful morning in early June, just back from my third graduation ceremony of this long commencement season; I have two more to go: my niece’s junior high school graduation, and a neighbor’s kindergarten commencement.
I love commencements of all kinds—from the musty rituals at high church where celebrants in medieval robes and odd-angled hats march in measured rows, to the propulsive affairs, hot and wild, where Gen-ADD catapults itself to the stage pierced with flash and color. From Pomp and Circumstance to Hip-Hop, I love them all, these warm-weather ceremonies, these spring-time festivities.
What I like best, I think, is that whatever form it takes, commencement is always a little celebration of liberation—everyone aflame and passionate, looking forward to taking the next giant step toward a wider world, more capable now, they hope, and more free. I always get a little contact high from all that communicable, dizzying optimism.
There is a bit of a downside to the ecstasy, I fear, for in one way or another every teacher education student over many years has told me this: “I couldn’t do all the wonderful things I’d planned and wanted to do this year, because I was only a student-teacher, but next year I’ll be free at last!” I hate to be the one to bring them down or to bum them out—to “harsh her mellow” as one student scolded me—but next year, her first year of teaching, is not likely to be an experience of freedom. Quite the contrary, it will probably be one of the most entangled, constrained, and difficult years of her life. This is something she, a beginning teacher, may need to know.
* * *
What follows is a tiny sample of answers to a simple question I regularly ask graduating education students, those who will soon become classroom teachers themselves: “What have you been told you must never do as a teacher?” I’m not making any of this up—I didn’t have to:
You cannot smile for the first several weeks of school, or until Christmas, or for the entire first year. Don’t eat lunch in the cafeteria. Don’t let them walk all over you. Don’t let them see you sweat.
You can’t be too friendly—don’t get attached to any of them.
You can’t hit the kids, of course, but don’t touch them either—no pats, pokes, taps, jabs. No hugs. Never be alone with a kid, and don’t give anyone a ride home. No home visits. Don’t lend them any money, either. Oh, yes, and don’t ever turn your back on them.
Don’t tolerate any breach of the rules—they’re testing you, or maybe just trying to get your attention. If they’re trying to get your attention, ignore them completely. If they’re testing you, get right in their faces.
Don’t allow any disorder in the hallways. Don’t let them laugh out loud, or voice a strong opinion in class.
Don’t swear, don’t scream. Don’t make threats you can’t keep, but when you know you can deliver on those threats, write everything down, or tape it, or video it. Cover yourself in case of a lawsuit.
You can’t trust anything a student says, they’re just trying to get over on you. You can never trust their parents—what are you crazy?—they’ll lie to your face to defend the little darlings. Remember: parents are the main reason the kids are the way they are, so of course they’ll lie, too.
Don’t give A’s first grading period—where can they go from there?
Don’t expect too much from them—for example, you won’t get completed homework from most. Never mind. Don’t deviate from the assigned curriculum and textbook—someone much smarter than you worked it all out already. Don’t expect any serious work right before lunch or right after lunch, or first thing in the morning or last thing in the afternoon.
Don’t tell your students anything about your personal life. Don’t let them know who you hang out with or where. Avoid places you might see them at night or on the weekends. Give them your phone number?... Are you out of your mind?
Don’t be too hard on yourself—these kids come from tough circumstances, and what could you do? Blame someone else: blame their parents, blame the system or the legislature or the union the mayor. Or blame your own parents—why not? After all, they blamed your grandparents.
Don’t be a teacher—don’t you know you’ll be overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated? What are you, nuts?

* * *
Amidst this blaring cacophony of settled opinion and received wisdom—what I’ve come to think of as an informal curriculum for the beginning teacher—teaching is somehow to be accomplished.
One noteworthy aspect of these little injunctions is their form: the operative word here is “don’t”. Whether you agree with the content or not—and I reject most of it—these bits of advice fail the test of positive, actionable propositions for beginning teachers: they enclose, discipline, and enforce, but there’s no space in them for forward motion, imagination, creativity, initiative, courage, discovery, or surprise. There’s no acknowledgement of the values, ethical dispositions, wild heart and curious mind necessary to become a great teacher, nor is there any practical advice whatsoever about getting started, nothing about creating a rich and inviting learning environment, not a word about working through the inevitable obstacles. Instead there’s a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants resignation, as well as concrete reinforcement of the worst aspects of the experience in all-too-many schools, things like contempt for parents, fear of students, lowering expectations, an unhealthy obsession with control, a culture of conformity and complaint. It’s an anticipatory set for mediocrity and failure.
Nor are teacher education programs exempt—the reign of a dull and unhelpful half-language of slogans is not a K-8 phenomenon, but a preschool through graduate school affair, indeed it infects the wider culture and is easily observable, for example, in popular films about teaching. This points to a real problem for teacher educators: if we want our students to break beyond this kind of cramped thinking, how far away from it are we in our own practice? How, for example, are we organizing our teaching in order for our students to experience something different? Do we (or do the structures of our programs) convey, for example, tacitly or not, a lack of trust? Do we or our programs encourage initiative, criticism, or different thinking? If our students have never experienced the transformative power of a trusting relationship in their own learning, how can we expect them to call up or invent such a disposition when they themselves are the teachers?
In any case these ubiquitous maxims are acceded to willingly at times, and grudgingly at other times—occasionally someone openly resists one or another, but it’s not easy. Each carries, after all, the odor of common sense, and there’s nothing more dogmatic nor insistent, more policing and self-promoting, than that.
* * *
I want beginning teachers to resist, to rebel against all of it, to reject these clichés, to stand on their own feet, and to make their way toward the moral heart of teaching at its best. I want them to do what needs to be done—again and again—in order to achieve teaching as an enterprise whose largest purpose is to help every human being reach the full measure of his or her humanity. Teaching as humanization, teaching as a project whose irreducible goal is both further enlightenment for each and greater freedom for all—this is the priceless ideal I want beginning teachers to focus on. To adequately consider that ideal requires moving beyond the fog of the merely given, clearing a free space for challenging the dogma and the orthodoxy that attaches itself to teaching like barnacles, sharp and ugly. What follows, then, is one part manifesto and one part educational agenda, an appeal to consider the larger goals of education and the ethical and intellectual underpinnings of teaching on the one hand, and a modest offering of practical arts for the beginning teacher on the other.
To begin we have to refocus on teaching as intellectual and ethical work, something beyond the instrumental and the linear. We need to understand that teaching requires thoughtful, caring people to carry it forward successfully, and we need, then, to commit to becoming more caring and more thoughtful as we grow into our work. This refocusing requires a leaning outward, a willingness to look at the world of children—the sufferings, the accomplishments, the perspectives and the concerns—and an awareness, sometimes joyous, but just as often painful, of all that we find. And it requires, as well, a leaning inward—in-breathing, in-dwelling—traveling toward self-knowledge, a sense of being alive and conscious in a going world. In each direction, each gesture, we acknowledge that every person is entangled and propelled and sometimes made mute by a social surround, and that each has, as well, a wild and vast inner life—a spirit, a soul, a mind. Going inward without consciously connecting to a larger world leads to self-referencing and worse, narcissism as truth; traveling outward without noting your own embodied heart and mind can easily lead to ethical astigmatism, moral blindness—to seeing children as a collection of objects for use.
I urge teachers to start in a different place, with a faith that every child comes to you as a whole and multidimensional being, much like yourself. Every human being, no matter who, is a gooey biological wonder, pulsing with the breath and beat of life itself, eating, sleeping, pissing and shitting, prodded by sexual urges, evolved and evolving, shaped by genetics, twisted and gnarled by the unique experiences of living—just like you. Every human being has as well a complex set of circumstances that makes his or her life understandable and sensible, bearable or unbearable; each is unique, each walks a singular path across the earth, each has a mother and a father, each with a distinct mark to be made, each is somehow sacred. This recognition asks us to reject any action that treats anyone as an object, any gesture that thingifies other human beings. It demands that we embrace the humanity of every student—that we take their side. Easy enough to say, excruciatingly difficult to enact in the daily lives of schools.
* * *
Practical Arts I: Shortly after class begins, gather all the students together on a rug, or the floor in an open space, or simply in a circle of chairs—the semblance of a meeting. This special demarcation—a few minutes set aside—will begin and end each day. It will become a regular, anticipated ritual of welcome and farewell.
On this first day introduce yourself, say a few brief words about your shared space and your hopes and expectations for them, and then announce that the class can only function well if everyone is aware of and follows the classroom rules. They were expecting this—eyes are already glazing over.
Pull out a stack of three or four posters, and begin by turning over rule number one. The first few rules are designed to surprise: You can eat in class if you’re hungry (please clean up after yourself); You can chew gum; You can wear your hats; Your desk (or cubby) is your own personal space—keep it as messy or tidy as you please, design or decorate it as you like. That kind of thing.
The final rule is this: We are a learning community—we need to respect one another and one another’s work. We will spend this whole year learning to live together.
All the rules can be posted, but it’s this last rule that will become the focus of conversation, not only on this first day, but day after day from September to June. It creates a standard to stretch toward, and it helps to build a culture of productive engagement. Of course it’s a rule in need of constant attention and clarification, but that’s the point. Instead of delineating every possible misdemeanor, it assumes that mistakes will be made, and we can correct them as we learn together how to get closer to the ideal. It reminds you that “classroom management” and “discipline” are never achieved once and for all, running along happily on automatic pilot. It creates the conditions for the teachable moment.
* * *
In the worlds of schools making students invisible is a sinularly unhealthy accomplishment, aided by tests and grades that function more as autopsies than diagnostics. We have become accustomed to the toxic habit of labeling, focusing relentlessly on presumed and prescribed deficits, failures, and shortcomings. B.D., L.D., A.D.D., T.A.G., D.A.P.—whatever this alphabet soup of signifiers points to, one seemingly unintended consequence is the shrinking of our capacity to see the three-dimensional, contradictory, complex, dynamic, on-a-voyage human beings before us. After all, to his community Harold may be a generous helper, but to his school he is a “reluctant reader”; among her friends Luz is known as an artist and a creative spirit, at school she is reduced to behavior disordered; all around the city Harp is an admired poet, at school he is ADHD. The fact is that each could be both, and a lot else. The labels aggregate when we ought to individualize, pathologize when we might search more vigorously the side of possibility. They are reductive rather than generous—after all people can be both needy and capable, and indeed all of us are. At the very least we might insist that these kinds of representations be written in disappearing ink.
* * *
Practical Arts II: Prepare for the first parent conference by collecting lots and lots and lots of examples of student work. Each student should have an ample folder of material to examine, analyze, and wonder over—and you should look through it with the kids first.
When the parent sits down, pull out the folder and say: I want to look at Zed’s work with you, and tell you a little more about what we’re doing here in class. But you know more about Zed than I will ever know, and so I’d like to start by asking you what you can tell me that will help me become a better teacher to Zed.
By honoring parents as more engaged and more expert about their own kids you can move some distance beyond defensiveness and competition, unlocking a source of valuable, special knowledge about your students. Try it: listen so they will speak, speak so they will listen.
* * *
Every human being is, after all, unfinished, every one of us is in process, in motion, in medias res—moving from place to place, from here to there, migrating, sometimes in patterns and sometimes not, growing, sent into exile on a certain day and on another day returning, learning, changing, seeing old things in surprising new ways, entering strange rooms, coming out, taking right and wrong turns, lost and then found and then lost again, meeting new people, passing through, riding on a bus or a train or a truck or a plane or a bicycle, drawing right and wrong conclusions, finding something, losing something else, practicing, reaching, missing, stretching, going, going, going. This is how we are: incomplete and aware of our incompleteness, on a voyage and on the move.
All of us, then, are actors and subjects, stars of our own lives; each of us is our very own author and inventor, agent and manager, director, curator, coordinator, chief of operations. Each human being is a project, and the human project is a project of inquiry conducted in the world and with one another, a project of restlessness and relentlessness, a ceaseless struggle to know and to be—the primal struggle that begins at birth and only ends with death. We seek the truth; we want to be free. How can we tap into that in our classrooms.
* * *
Practical Arts III: In the first weeks of school find a way to interview each student individually—for example, while folks are involved in some work, sit with one and then another and then another until you’ve covered the whole. Ask them three questions: What do you want to learn in first grade (or this science class)? What do you expect of me as your teacher? (What makes a good teacher?) What do you expect from the other kids? Write down their responses, and work with them in the larger group—you’ve now got the basis of a classroom constitution.
Think of these questions for yourself:
Who am I?
Where am I from?
How did I get here?
What can I do now?
Think of how these four questions could power work in your classroom. They require strategies for reflection, for discovery, for action, for overcoming. They ask you to assume that there is much wisdom in the room, and to co-create some part of the curriculum drawing on personal and community knowledge already there.
Take the first:
Who am I? Whatever and wherever you teach, think of 25 activities (small or sustained) that begin here and would engage kids in learning.
* * *
A commitment to seeing the person requires a radical reversal: teachers whatever else they do, must become students of their students, fully human subjects who become a source of knowledge and information and energy, actors, speakers, creators, constructors, thinkers, doers—a teacher as well as a learner. Together students and teachers explore, inquire, investigate, search, ask questions, criticize, make connections, draw tentative conclusions, pose problems, act, seek the truth, name this and that phenomenon, circle back, plunge forward, reconsider, gather steam, pause, reflect, reimagine, wonder, build, assert themselves, listen carefully, and speak. It doesn’t end.
Becoming a student of her students, the teacher opposes the manipulative reduction of their lives into neatly labeled packages. She resists both the easy embrace of oversimplified identities—a reliance on a single aspect of a life to say it all—and the corrosive gesture of fragmenting lives into conceptually crude categories. Her stance is identification with, not identification of, her students. Her approach is solidarity, not service.
Think of a new mother and infant beginning to nurse. Who is the teacher, who the learner? Look closely. You’ll notice that each is unsure, each committed to figuring it out. The improvisational dance is one of attention, experimentation, adjustment, learning and teaching. The relationship is the thing.
Take a step out from behind the desk, away from the lectern, off the pedestal, and perhaps off the cliff. There is a feeling of vertigo as one looks with new eyes, as the familiar is made strange. There is risk and there is fear—hard work, this never ending attentiveness, this improvisation—but there is satisfaction as well. One frees oneself from the terror of teaching, the dizzying pose of authority. She no longer has to pretend to be a god, all knowing, all powerful, beneficent one minute, punishing the next. She can shed the hypocrisy and phoniness of the authoritative teacher pose and begin to face herself as she really is. She can discover others as they really are, too, and recognize that there is always more to know in all directions—each is after all an unruly spark of meaning making energy. Who in the world are they?
* * *
Human beings—and particularly teachers—are driven by a long, continuous: I don’t know. It’s a tiny phrase that soars on huge and propulsive wings, for it awakens the imagination. It is, after all, not the known that powers us forward; it is, rather peering into the unknown. We must be serious about preparation, hard work, discipline and labor. But we must also cultivate habits of vigilance and awareness, a radical openness, as we continually remind ourselves that in an infinite and expanding universe our ignorance is vast, our finiteness itself all the challenge we ought to need to go further. In this light we nourish an imagination which is defiant and limitless, and like the color blue or love or friendship, ineffable, impossible to define without a maiming reductiveness. It is our gusto, our immersion, our urgency, enthusiasm, and raw nerve that will take us hurling toward the next horizon. We remind ourselves that the greatest work awaits us, and that we are never higher than when we’re not certain exactly where we’re going.
Teachers work toward greater enlightenment; they see knowledge as a form of power, a particular kind of power that can be employed against the naked power of brute force. Knowledge has the power to undermine and, perhaps, to overthrow force. But to do so, knowledge must be freely sought, explicitly linked to moral purposes, and tied to conduct. It must stand for something.
“Objectivity” in teaching, then, is not a self-evident good, not in the twisty, distorted contexts in which we find ourselves. Of course, getting all the evidence one can, and making judgments in light of that evidence, is an important goal. But while a metalurgist would be a fool to tinker or deceive in regard to accurate and reliable measurements, if she determined in advance that she prefers making a plow to a sword, that determination in no way asks for distorted measurements. Just so a teacher: that she prefers peace to war, national rights to occupation, women’s equal rights to patriarchy requires no distortion.
Calls for “balance” in teaching and scholarship, which draw force from a tie to “objectivity”, are similarly peculiar and precarious. If the purpose of education is to seek the truth through evidence and argument, “balance” could only sensibly mean: “Find and present all the evidence you can.” If by “balance” people mean the equal presentation of contradictory perspectives, the classroom becomes little more than a site of incessant bickering. The classroom task is to achieve judgment based on the widest and deepest available evidence. This means open debate, continuous inquiry, dialogue, and, yes, taking a stand.
* * *
Practical Arts IV: Commit some time and some space in your classroom for learning from rather than learning about—learning from nature rather than about nature; from history, from literature, from community; learning from democracy, not about democracy.
A teacher I know in Chicago worked with his fifth graders to identify an issue of concern that they could work to understand and perhaps impact. After much discussion they chose to look at the dilapidated condition of their school: What was the condition of the building? How did it compare to other schools? How did it get this way? How could they document what they were learning? How could they bring about change? The students learned about photography, video, creating a web site, writing, advocacy, public speaking, book-making, graphing, measurement and a lot else. Mostly they learned the power of asking questions of the world and pursuing answers to the outer limits.
* * *
I want beginning teachers to be aware of the stakes, and aware as well that there is no simple technique or linear path that will take them to where they need to go, and then allow them to live out settled teacherly lives, untroubled and finished. There is in fact no promised land in teaching; there is instead that aching, persistent tension between reality and possibility, between vulnerability and culpability.
I want beginning teachers to figure out what they are working for, and what they are working against. I want to work against oppression and subjugation, for example, and against exploitation, unfairness, and unkindness, and I want others to join me in that commitment. I want to work toward freedom, for enlightenment and awareness, wide awakeness, protection of the weak, cooperation, generosity, compassion, and love. I want my work to mean something worthwhile in the lives of my students, my friends, my collaborators, and in the larger worlds that they will inhabit and create.
I want new teachers to commit to a path with a certain direction and rhythm: become a student of your students first, and then create a lively community through dialogue; love your neighbors; question everything; defend the downtrodden; challenge and nourish yourself and others; seek balance.
* * *
Practical Arts V: End each day by asking yourself how you could have done better with this kid or that situation. What alternatives exist? What can I learn from my mistakes? How can I make a better move tomorrow? In the infinitely complex world of teaching there is always something more to know, something more to do. Without self-criticism we risk self-righteousness. Don’t turn into one of those familiar characters in every school who’s seen it all and knows everything: Growth requires doubt.
Begin each day forgiving yourself for your failures and your short-comings. Start over in this corner of this room. Without self-forgiveness we risk burning out.
The best staff development is horizontal not vertical. It, too, unlocks the wisdom in the room, the tacit knowledge of teachers talking about teaching with other teachers. Develop a small group of teachers willing to talk together about the content and the conduct of your work. Meet once a week or once every other week for at least an hour. Each meeting should focus on one teacher. For ten minutes she describes her learning environment and the rhythm of her day. For ten minutes the group offers feedback and reactions. For the next fifteen minutes she describes a student through that student’s work, and again there is an opportunity to reflect and talk back. That’s it—no whining, no focus on the bureaucratic—attention to students, to the environment, to pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment; a relentless focus on those things we can control.
* * *
“If I only had a home…a heart…a brain…the nerve.” The four hopeful seekers skipping together down the yellow brick road toward Oz sing their desires to one another and to the heavens. Each has diagnosed for him or herself a deficiency, identified a lack, recognized a need. Each has become painfully conscious of something missing, a hole in need of repair. Each is stirred to action against an obstacle to his or her fullness, and each gathers momentum and power from the others, from intimate relationship forged through collective struggle.
This is not a bad start for beginning teachers seeking a vocabulary of basics in their quest for wholeness and for goodness in teaching—a home, a heart, a brain, the nerve. There is more, to be sure, but these can send you skipping down your own yellow brick roads into the beyond.
Teaching is intellectual and ethical work; it takes a thoughtful, reflective, and caring person to do it well. It takes a brain and a heart. The first and fundamental challenge for teachers is to embrace students as three-dimensional creatures, as distinct human beings with hearts and minds and skills and dreams and capacities of their own, as people much like ourselves. This embrace is initially an act of faith—we must assume capacity even when it is not immediately available or visible—because we work most often in schools where aggregating and grouping kids on the flimsiest evidence is considered common sense, where the toxic habit of labeling youngsters on the basis of their deficits is a commonplace. A teacher needs a brain to break through the cotton wool smothering the mind, to see beyond the blizzard of labels to this specific child, trembling and whole and real, and to this one, and to this. And a teacher needs a heart to fully grasp the importance of that gesture, to recognize in the deepest core of your being that every child is precious, each induplicable, the one and only who will ever walk the earth, deserving of the best a teacher can give—respect, awe, reverence, commitment.
A teacher who takes up this fundamental challenge is a teacher working against the grain—you have got to have the nerve. All the pressures of schooling push teachers to act as clerks and functionaries—interchangeable parts in a vast and gleaming and highly rationalized production line. To teach with a heart and a brain—to see education as a deeply humanizing enterprise opening infinite possibilities for your students—requires courage. Courage is a quality nurtured in solidarity with others—it is an achievement of colleagues and allies. In order to teach with thought and care and courage, you really need a home.
The four seekers lurching toward Oz provide one other lesson for us. We can all constantly work to identify obstacles to our freedom, to our fullness. The obstacles will change as we develop and grow, but there is always more to know, always more to become, more to do. In our quest we can all reach out for allies and friends to give us the strength and power to move on. And we can now know in advance that there is no wizard at the end of the road, no higher power with a magic wand to solve our all-too-human problems. Recognizing that the people with the problems are also the people with the solutions, and that waiting for the lawmakers, the system, or the union—or any other fraudulent great power hidden behind a heavy curtain—to save us or to get it right before we ourselves get it right is to wait a lifetime. We can look inside ourselves, summon strengths we never knew we had, connect up with other teachers and parents and kids to create the schools and classrooms we deserve—thoughtful places of decency, sties of peace and freedom and justice. We are on the way, then, to our real Emerald Cities.
In your classroom as in your life, the relationships you build are most important. Make them mutual. Listen with the possibility of being changed; speak with the possibility of being heard.
Practical Arts VI: Pay attention to the environment for learning. The environment, after all, trumps the lesson plan in almost every instance. Create a literate environment—a space of language and words, of speaking, of writing and reading—and you are more likely to help students be more literate.
In a lovely French documentary film called To Be and to Have, a middle-aged, one-room-schoolhouse teacher in rural France cares for a dozen or so youngsters who appear to range in age from five or six to about twelve. The film opens with a long, still shot of the empty classroom—chairs on desks, brightly painted pictures everywhere, plants, photographs, pencils and markers. It is the classroom at rest, and one anticipates a sudden explosion of youthful energy as the day begins. But the camera lingers. And then, without fanfare, a turtle steps out from beneath a bookshelf, and then another. We watch the two plod slowly across the floor in a ponderous point, counterpoint.
The dance of the turtles is a metaphor for George Lopez’s teaching: things are slow, nothing is hurried. In a world of instant everything, of moving sidewalks and staircases, of fast food and processed words, Lopez acknowledges that the growth of a human being takes times. There is time to become deeply involved, time to pursue objects, time to make and correct mistakes, and time to resolve the little conflicts that will always erupt in a group. There is little evidence of the characteristic superficial encounter and the hurried plan—minutes here, minutes there—the curriculum of “I know; you don’t know.” All five senses are engaged, big kids helping younger students, everyone with responsibilities, expectations, jobs, goals, and limits. There’s a palpable feel of growth and change, an exhilaration that our classroom now is not as it was yesterday, nor as it will be tomorrow, and neither are the students or the teacher. They are on a voyage with no clear beginning and no end in sight.
In a second-grade classroom I visited in Chicago I saw a job chart, a cleanup chart, a free-time chart, and a chart of favorite books; a street map, a transit map, and several distinctly different world maps sharing space with student-made maps of the classroom, the neighborhood, and their own homes; a cooking area with a “juice bar” and colorful posters depicting “Noodles,” “Chile,” “Mushrooms,” “Cheeses of the World,” and “Natural Dyes”; each child’s specific self-authored and handmade stamp, diary dictionary, thesaurus, “tiny books,” icon, math books, puzzles, and board games; puppets; blocks; a bowl of leaves; a sofa and a rug; two large tree stumps; and a bin of scrap wood. Like Lopez’s classroom the environment felt rich and deep, inviting and potentially engaging. I was dazzled by all the little things I had never seen or thought of before—the idea of a self-selected icon for each child, a symbol such as a sun or a toothbrush, which appeared next to the child’s name on the board, the cubby, and books and papers, struck me as a smart addition to early reading; all the personalized handmade books extending even these very young students’ sense of themselves as creators and authors. But what impressed me most with this collection of artifacts wasn’t this or that piece in particular. Rather there was a strong sense that this learning space was the intentional design of a particular intelligence, that the architect of the environment had a purpose and a vision for her students and herself, and that her hopes, priorities, and commitments—moral, intellectual, social, individual—were evident in dazzling detail in her classroom.
* * *
In your classroom as in your life, you will encounter obstacles and opposition that you must find a way to resist. Don’t be a Cassandra—whiny, unpleasant, and unheard. But, yes, do speak the truth as you see and understand it to power, find allies, and act on what the known demands.
In your classroom as in your life, what you do out of generosity and mutual love will be mostly the right thing to do.

2006 Carolina SHOUT: Act III

2006-03-29T16:01:00.000-06:00

Introduction: The most innovative and propulsive celebration of teaching that I know is the brainchild of Craig Kridel, the brilliant Renaissance man and professor at the University of South Carolina, and it's called CAROLINA SHOUT! Here's a write up from Spring, 2006.

The drama of education is always a narrative of change. Act I is life as we find it—the given, the known or the received, the already settled and assumed, the status quo. But there’s always something more to do, something more to learn and to know, something more to experience and accomplish. Act II is the fireworks, the wild upheaval and the crazy dissonance, the vast experience of discovery and surprise, the intense energy of remodeling and refashioning. Act III is the achievement of an altered angle of regard, new ways of knowing and behaving, a different way of seeing and being. Transformation. Act III, of course, will one day be recast as a new Act I, and the never-ending journey toward the new will begin again. Teaching changes lives.
This sense of growth and change, learning and transformation, fireworks and upheaval, was on full display at the 2006 CAROLINA SHOUT! This was Act III, and it channeled all the love and hope, all the hugs and tears from Acts I and II, with some spice and flavor—like any home-cooked meal—all its own.
Kenny Carr and the Tigers, founding partners, co-authors and co-conspirators with Craig Kridel in this most unique and uplifting testimonial to teachers, have become pit orchestra and indispensable cultural marker for the SHOUT. When Kenny hit it, the line of horns came blasting to life, and everyone leapt up, our spirits rising in righteous appreciation. It was a joy to behold.
Ten-year-old Aileene Roberts shouted out with remarkable poise and grace for her teacher Ms. Tiffany Smith, whose tiny baby son Jeremiah stole the show as well as the hearts of those of us who took turns holding him during the proceedings. Traci Young Cooper, national Teacher of the Year in 2001, honored her Columbia High School French teacher, Madame Lilease Hall, this diminutive yet regal presence who “opened worlds to us,” and believed that her students could overcome any barriers to their dreams. And Craig Melvin, WIS news anchor, thanked Doug Brandon and Michael Fanning for never giving up on kids, and for creating idiosyncratic environments that were filled with interesting, provocative, and nourishing opportunities to learn, and kept him engaged in spite of his predilections to do otherwise.
A sense of opportunity and renewal—for individuals, for whole communities and societies—was at the heart of it all, the ineffable magic drawing our spirits back to the classroom and the school again and again. Like these students and their teachers, we felt ourselves becoming more powerfully and self-consciously alive, challenged toward further knowledge, enlightenment, and human community, toward liberation.
Here was a faith that every child and every student and every teacher as well comes as a whole and multidimensional being—a gooey biological wonder, pulsing with the breath and beat of life itself, evolved and evolving, shaped by genetics, twisted and gnarled by the unique experiences of living. Each has as well a complex set of circumstances that makes his or her life understandable and sensible, bearable or unbearable. Each is unique, each walks a singular path across the earth, each has a mother and a father, each with a distinct mark to be made, and each is somehow sacred. That insight, that understanding is something worth shouting about. SHOUT!