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versity. They are concerned, for that matter, with the quality of
learning that our whole educational system offers not only to the
"dis–
advantaged" but to nearly all children.
As
John Holt, among others,
has made clear: ". . . almost all children fail. Except for a handful,
who mayor may not be good students, they fail to develop more tlian
a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding
and creating with which they were born and of which they made
full
use during the first two or three years of their lives"
(How
Children Fail,
Pitman).
Also among the potential new radicals are those graduates of
the Peace Corps who are finding it frustratingly difficult to "adjust"
to normal niche-finding at home because there is so little sense of
community, of continual challenge, of continual involvement in work
that is meaningful apart from the drive for income or the brittle
safety of status. And among the very young and the very inchoate,
there are those who hear themselves in the songs of Bob Dylan. That
exacerbating minnesinger has no program except for "attack therapy"
on the way the parents and teachers of his listeners live.
But it is still within "the movement"-and in the extensions of
"the movement" beyond civil rights into organizing the poor of all
colors to organize themselves-that there is the best chance for an
operative rather than a merely rhetorical new radicalism. I mean, for
example, those members of Students for a Democratic Society who
have acted as catalysts in the formation of "community unions" in
ghettos, white and black, in some ten cities. Or the Northern Student
Movement, which started primarily to offer tutorial aid to the young
black poor, soon discovered the vast insufficiency of this sort of melior–
ism, and is now also engaged in trying to set up centers of power
in the ghetto-power through rent strikes, through boycotts, and,
as soon as possible, through political action.
These street radicals are simultaneously pragmatists and vision–
aries. They are not beguiled by the myths of the inherent revolutionary
potential of the poor or the inevitability of class struggle. They do,
however, realize-as a number of older, retired radicals do not-that
class cleavage in this country is deepening. Aware of how difficult
it is going to be to move the poor-with whatever allies they can
muster-to struggle, they can function on the one hand with the
conviction that immediate self-interest is going to provide the momen-
