PARTISAN REVIEW
553
The classroom is a very private place for the teacher. In public
schools, to be sure, the teacher's day is apparently regulated by lesson
plans and school-wide policies, but in fact the moment-to-moment ex–
perience within a classroom poses, unremittingly, a test of self and, for
many, a threat to it; it entails, moreover, a very special relationship
between student and teacher which no lesson plan can long avert.
Probably for this reason, the essays by teachers in this volume are
usually deeply personal and, therefore, convincing, with an almost self–
conscious refusal to adopt the bureaucratic and pseudoscientific lan–
guage of most colleges of education. They see the classroom as a place
where children and teacher interact in altogether personal and human
ways, and if they tend toward autobiography it is because they see
no discontinuity between the work of a teacher and his quality as a
human being.
The strength of the excerpt from Herndon's book, for example,
depends upon his alertness to his own uncertainties and needs and to
his students' altogether unspoken desires to be recognized as people. He
comprehends their behavior in human tenus and rejects his colleague's
description of all the students as "The Tribe."
Or
rather, once having
introduced the tenu, he uses it ironically to help him locate the shared
characteristics of his students in order to understand their very per–
sonal idiosyncrasies. Herndon doesn't put himself in the forefront, but
he is there, speculating, worrying, unsentimentally seeing what the stu–
dents are up to. What does it feel like to have paper handed out one
sheet at a time? What does it feel like not to know how to read in the
seventh grade? What does it feel like to make fun of one's own racial
characteristics? Herndon soon discovered that the students were not, as
he feared, belittling themselves and perfonuing as they did simply for
his benefit:
"If
I had imagined that the students of GW would present
a united front on the question of their own (relative) blackness, it was
a mistake.
If
I had supposed they were concerned with testing me, that
was a mistake too. They weren't interested in degrees of liberal white
attitudes like they spozed to be." Nothing profound here, nor in the
rest of Herndon's discoveries about his students and about the educa–
tional system in which they fail to learn. Only the willingness and ener–
gy
to make discoveries, to respond to the peculiar qualities of his class.
Kozol and Kohl record, similarly, their own uncertainties, the test
of the classroom, their deepening relations with students and - as with
Herndon - the retaliation against their humanizing tactics by the school
systems in which they worked. In the Boston School Committee Report
which justified the dismissal of Kozol from his teaching position, Kozol
is commended for his imagination, initiative and enthusiasm. But be-
