PARTISAN REVIEW
639
Another Spanish sanctity to be sported with is Death. Sometimes this
works magnificently, as in the grandmother's preparations for her funeral ,
sometimes dubiously, as in Don Juan's elaborate escape from death at the
end. Again, this may be justified by the forrt;! .
One great virtue of the book, about which I have no reservations, is its
proficiency in sensuousness. Mr. Gardner seems to have used a Jesuit
discipline, the application of the five senses, whenever he possibly could,
especially touch and sight. His pictorial handling draws very knowingly
on Spanish painting, on Goya in particular, I should say, in all his range
from the exquisitely pretty to the grotesque and dreadful, but it reads won–
derfully, with or without benefit of art history. None of this richness, nor the
verbal richness, which to some tastes must seem excessive, holds up the speed
of story and rhetoric. The book may well be conceived or felt in terms of the
cinema, combining full color and violent motion, but that is not untrue to the
art of the late Renaissance or high baroque, and one may read it with pleasure
both ways.
Donald Sutherland
THE SCHOOL AS BATTLEFIELD
THE GREAT SCHOOL WARS,
New York City, 1805-1973. A History of the
Public Schools as Battlefield of Social Change.
By Diane Ravltch. Basic
Books. $12.95.
The New York City school system is large and cumbersome, it
uses an obsolescent plant and some antiquated procedures to provide unreli–
able services of essential social benefit.
It
numbers millions of citizens among
its clients and beneficiaries, and, like the Penn Central Railroad, it has often
been plundered for narrow selfish power struggles pursued without respect
for the larger social needs it professed to serve. The public school system is
probably no more bureaucratic or unwieldy than other complex institutions
in a mass society, and probably less vulnerable to graft. But, as Diane Ravitch's
study shows, the history of the public school since 1805, is the history of
repeated, increasing, and comprehensive ravages by the forces of ideology. In
fact, Mrs. Ravitch's meticulous review asserts that the public schools were, and
still are, not merely the reflection of social change but actually the battlefield
on which it is staged, and at the same time the schools are the stakes in the
