552
GEORGE
LEVINE
evasion - short-term survival and long-tenn sucide. The activities Henry
and Herndon describe are, in fact, recognizable outside the classroom.
The schools are our society in small. The radical American experi–
ment of educating everybody, like the radical American experiment of
government of, for and by the people, seems to be swerving toward a
bureaucracy which in order to operate efficiently and democratically
is forced, too often, to defend itself against the very people it was pre–
sumably intended to serve. The happy American classrooms of elemen–
tary schools are among the most conservative institutions in the country,
and the teacher frequently adopts the role -largely in self-defense–
of making control rather than release of energy his main function. That
energy, we see, does not in the long run stay controlled. Indeed, one
wonders why the current explosions have been so long
in
coming, why
the political rhetoric of "up yours" and "kill the pig," the antiintellec–
tualism of our brightest young, the uproar at Ocean Hill-Brownsville,
the revolutionary energies of adolescence, had not long ago been di–
rected at our schools. From their earliest school days, students hear the
rhetoric of the American revolution in a context utterly alien to that
rhetoric.
If
Black they are penalized for not talking and writing the
language of the classes which repress them; if white they learn the
strategies of "civilized" competition while ostensibly studying the facts
and skills which, graduation speeches will tell them, are to make them
"the future leaders of America." They learn quite well what that lead–
ership consists of.
This volume does not even touch upon the most immediate practical
problem: how to make it possible for imagination and intelligence
im–
portantly to effect American education. And because it confines itself
to considerations of the imagination and intelligence (outside the seats
of power) it can be illusorily cheering. In some instances, imagination
and sensibility seem to have made the'ir mark, to have diverted some
students from the disillusion with education and with the ideals of
freedom that turn too many of them, eventually, into cynicism or rebel-
lion. And it is worth looking at how that can be done. The volume
claims only that radical refonn is necessary and possible; it does not
i
provide a program for its accomplishment. While we await full-scale
change, seriously engaged teachers persist in struggling to save their
students from the system in which they are all entrapped. They put
their feelings and their very selves on the line, frequently meeting even
more profound discouragement from the students than from established
powers. But they recognize that in any given classroom the system
is
i
always secondary to the teacher and that a good teacher can do much
\
to keep even the worst of systems from doing its damage.
