PARTISAN REVIEW
561
Of course, the American eduoational system will not stand for this
from its teachers. More important, perhaps, many of the most deeply
engaged teachers will not stand for it. Such a notion of the teacher's
role constitutes a threat to an entire life style, an entire social structure;
moreover, it requires extraordinarily sensitive and intelligent and durable
teachers. I doubt that there are enough to go around. The imagination
of the few, represented here, has to deal with educational institutions
which annually deal with millions of students. I confess that I would
be frightened by unequivocal and universal willingness to allow the release
of so much wildly undisciplined energy. But I fear I have nothing to
fear. With so much invested in schools as they are, and with such inten–
sity of engagement required to produce change, it is sadly unlikely that
many of these millions of children will benefit from this genuinely
imaginative and unfrightened imagination. In the long run only a
change in the social system can radically change the educational system.
Yet the social changes probably need to be preceded by educational ones.
It
is
all a mess; but if the changes are taking place that will produce a
sufficiently liberated generation to make the larger changes without
fear, they are being created by people like Anne Long who have no
fixed notions of the way it spozed to be and who have the by now
un-American quality of being willing to live without certainty.
-Itt'''..., ••
'NEW YORKER)
Broadway and 88th Street
TR <4-9189
George Levine
