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energize other kinds of refonn in education - the tightening up of cur–
ricula, the development of comprehensive schools; eventually Vietnam
made us aware that the educational system was producing cannon-fodder
among the poor, college deferments among the middle class; and this
forced us to face the de facto separate and unequal system in the North;
finally, the close look entailed by these discoveries made us aware that
public education was failing almost every possible test.
The first four documents collected in this volume - chapters from
books by Herndon, Kozol, Holt and Jules Henry - will be familiar to
many readers seriously concerned with the problems of education in
America. But taken together they make even more evident the subtle
ways in which methods of teaching are allied to political and social
strategies, the great risk involved in attempting to break out of the con–
ventions institutionally assumed to represent realities, and the futility of
expecting serious changes through the work of individual and imagina–
tive teachers. The fierceness and precision of such reports as are gathered
here can only intensify our rather luxurious feelings of guilt unless they
are accompanied by systematic attempts to change the structure of things
as they are. Some of our young have instinctively learned this, to the
confusion and disgust of the generation that expected gratitude rather
than contempt.
They learned it partly because of what they did not learn while in
school. My own very middle-class son, excited at five years old at the
way words could record experience, finally gave up an early habit of
keeping a notebook full of reflections when his teacher kept insisting
that his "h's" were crooked. He is learning now what millions of kids
have already learned: the irrelevance of learning to all but the narrow–
est aspects of his life, the distinction between knowledge and experience,
the unreality of the values explicitly announced in classroom and text–
books, the dangers of self-expression, the finality of power. At some point
he will discover what many of the noisiest college students in America
have already discovered, that American education can be used to thwart
the talents and powe,rs they might most usefully be encouraged to
develop. Perhaps, in the long run, these are good lessons, but only if
they make our students sufficiently angry to try to do something about it.
Jules Henry describes, in the chapter here, schools and classrooms
where education serves only "to prevent the truly creative intellect from
getting out of hand," and where regulations and traditions and simple
human indifference protect frightened teachers from the responsibility
of touching the lives of their students (or from being touched by them).
Herndon describes a classroom in which the students' positive genius
(of a kind) was distorted into brilliant techniques of disruption and
