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GEORGE LEVINE
cause he insisted on working outside of the prescribed reading list, in
particular on using Langston Hughes's poem, "Ballad of a Landlord,"
he had to be dismissed: "Obviously," the report notes, "a measure of
control over the course of study is essential to protect the 94,000 Boston
school children from ideologies and concepts not acceptable to our way
of life." Apparently only the institution can be ideologized and the class–
room can't even put other ideologies to a test.
But Kozol was not concerned with ideology or with testing the
institution's ideology. He was trying to respond to the interests and
concerns of the students who happened to be in his class; like many
other contributors to this volume, he sees the teacher's responsibility
precisely in the attempt to respond to the uniqueness of each of his
students. But there are, of course, alernative views which would regard
this notion of the teacher's responsibility as sentimental. The essay by
Marshall McLuhan and George Leonard, for example, while ostensibly
arguing for "custom" teaching, actually argues for the dissolution of
the relationship between teacher and student. There will be a new free
electronic environment where the student learns but nobody teaches.
Somehow, if our schools keep changing fast enough, with the introduc–
tion of the almost infinite possibilities of electronic equipment, we'll
be
all right. The faith in machinery and the ultimate implausibility of the
vision this creates can, perhaps, be adequately demonstrated by one sen–
tence in the essay: "Even today, most U.S. automobiles are in a sense,
custom produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options
and colors available on a certain new family sports car, for example,
a computer expert came up with 25
million
different versions of it for
a buyer." Call in the expert, but don't bother looking at the cars. This
kind of nonsense obviously fails to cope with the nature of the people
who sell and the people who buy, the way the materials are produced,
the way demand is created, and the real nature of the variations among
the different cars. Technology might be put to some of the uses McLuhan
imagines. But let the uses be humanly determined. McLuhan's curious
insensitivity to human perversity, anxiety and complication invalidates
much of his argument.
There is an academically conservative argument that makes for a
far more effective attack on the view that the schools must be respon–
sive to each student's uniqueness.
It
begins with the assumption that
there are subject matters to be learned and that these are what they
are regardless of who studies them. This assumption places the teacher
in a strictly professional role. He teaches and judges exclusively in tenns
of success in mastering material. This role has been muddied by a
